BUILDING HAPOEL TEL AVIV B.C.
A club is not a logo, a roster or a campaign. It is a system people decide to belong to. This one began at the bottom and had to earn every layer on the way up.
The brief did not arrive as a brief
Hapoel Tel Aviv B.C. was not a consulting engagement handed over with a scope document. It was a club that had to exist. The idea was fan ownership: supporters would not simply consume the team, they would be part of the structure that owned it. That meant the product was never only basketball. Membership, identity, trust, matchday, merchandise and the commercial model all had to reinforce the same promise.
The club became Israel’s first fan-owned professional club. Over eight years it moved from the lowest division to the Premier League. The sporting climb is the easiest part of the story to summarise; the harder work sat underneath it, in the routines that had to function every week whether the team won or lost.
What we actually owned
Fan ownership creates a different operating pressure. Supporters are customers, stakeholders and critics at the same time. A decision that might look small in an ordinary company can become an identity question inside a club. The work therefore had to connect commercial reality with supporter credibility rather than treating them as competing worlds.
Membership needed to mean something. Merchandise had to feel like the club rather than merchandise placed on top of it. Matchday had to turn a sports fixture into a repeatable community experience. Commercial activity had to finance growth without making supporters feel that the thing they owned had been handed back to marketing.
What made it hard
Growth exposes weak structures. Moving through divisions changes costs, expectations, staffing, media attention and the standard of the operation. The culture that works when everybody knows everybody cannot simply be frozen while the organisation gets larger. It has to be translated into systems without becoming corporate theatre.
That tension — preserving the reason people care while professionalising everything around it — became one of the most useful operating lessons in the Dubel Team story. The answer was not to choose culture over business or business over culture. The job was to build a business whose commercial engine depended on understanding the culture correctly.
What stayed with us
The club taught a principle that still shapes our work: community is not an audience segment. If people genuinely identify with a product, venue or institution, they notice when the operator understands them and when it does not. That is why fan culture later became a distinct practice inside Dubel Team rather than a marketing label.
It also set the standard for what we mean by “operator.” Advice has value, but somebody still has to open the doors, make the numbers work, solve the weekly problems and take responsibility when the plan meets reality.