HAPOEL TEL AVIV F.C.

The difficult part of working with an old football club is not inventing an identity. It is understanding the one that already exists well enough not to damage it.

The brief

The work around Hapoel Tel Aviv F.C. sat on the brand and commercial side of the club: identity, fan engagement, merchandise and the relationship between what supporters feel and what the club can responsibly turn into commercial value.

That sounds conventional until the audience is a football support base with decades of memory. Supporters do not experience a club as a consumer brand. They remember shirts, songs, terraces, eras, people and defeats. They also remember every attempt to package that history badly.

What we actually owned

The operating question was not “how do we make this more marketable?” It was “what can the club sell, say or change without breaking the relationship that makes the brand valuable in the first place?” That distinction matters.

Merchandise, for example, is not only a product category. A shirt can carry memory. A graphic can reference an era. A commercial campaign can either understand the supporters’ internal language or expose that the club is talking at them from outside. The work therefore starts with listening and pattern recognition before it reaches design or revenue.

What made it hard

Football clubs live in permanent tension between short-term pressure and long-term identity. Results change the mood every week. Ownership, management, players and coaches come and go. The supporter relationship has to survive all of them.

That means brand work cannot be built around a temporary campaign idea. It needs to sit on things that remain true when the table changes. In a club with a strong supporter culture, those durable assets are usually not slogans invented in a room. They are the symbols, rituals, memories and distinctions supporters already use to explain who they are.

What stayed with us

The lesson became useful far beyond football: when a community already has a language, the operator’s job is not to replace it. The job is to translate it into products, experiences and commercial decisions without stripping out the thing that gave it meaning.

This is why Dubel Team treats fan culture as operating knowledge. It is not decoration around the business. In the right club, it is part of the business model itself.