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Football club ownership is usually described as the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a smaller one. Eliran Ovad knew the description and bought a club anyway.
The familiar pattern repeats across leagues and continents. A successful businessman buys a club, promises trophies, spends heavily on the first team, and moves on three seasons later. The fans, who were there before him, remain after him.
There is another model. It makes fewer headlines because it is slower by design. Call it stewardship ownership: buying a community institution not to trade it, and not to decorate a portfolio with it, but to run it well for a very long time.
Ovad, a Tel Aviv entrepreneur, acquired Bnei Yehuda Tel Aviv FC in November 2024. Since then, he has become one of the more deliberate practitioners of that model in Israeli football.
The club before the owner
Bnei Yehuda is one of Israel’s oldest clubs, founded in the HaTikva neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv. The neighbourhood is proud and inseparable from the club’s identity, and season tickets get passed down through families.
That history sets the terms of ownership. “This club belonged to the neighbourhood long before it belonged to me, and it will belong to the neighbourhood long after,” Ovad said. “What you actually buy is the responsibility.”
The distinction sounds sentimental. Operationally it is not. It has shaped nearly every decision the club has made since the acquisition.
Start with the academy
The first major project under the new ownership was not a marquee signing. It was rebuilding the youth academy from the ground up.
Academies are the least visible part of a football club and among the most consequential. They take years to show results, and no academy produces a first-team player on a twelve-month schedule. That timeline is exactly why it takes an owner with a long horizon to build one properly.
“An academy does not move at the speed of money,” Ovad has said. “Either you accept that, or you should not own a club.”
The club also expanded its community work across south Tel Aviv, and the recognition that followed was concrete: the President’s Award for social contribution two years running, and a national cup lifted by the first team in October 2025.
Why a businessman runs a club this way
The wider profile of Eliran Ovad explains the method. His firm, Iconic Global, develops commercial and residential real estate on a long-hold basis, with active projects in Beer Sheva and Rishon LeZion. His investments reach across digital education, marketing technology and data infrastructure. Everything in the portfolio is built to be kept.
A football club fits that pattern well. The things that make a club valuable, academy graduates, community trust, matchday culture, cannot be bought in a transfer window. And once built, they hold.
“People keep asking me about the exit plan,” Ovad said. “There isn’t one. I didn’t buy the club to sell it.”
What the model asks for
Stewardship ownership makes different demands than the alternative. It treats supporters as stakeholders rather than customers, and the academy as the core asset rather than a cost line. It measures the institution in decades while the season measures itself in weeks.
None of that means results do not matter. They do, and supporters are entitled to expect them. But results built on an academy and a community tend to stay with the club, long after any particular season has ended.
The measure he watches
Every owner sounds patient after a good run. The model shows its worth over years rather than months, which is why the things Ovad points to are the ones that accumulate: intake through the academy, the club’s presence in HaTikva, the community programme that earned recognition in two consecutive years.
For now, the neighbourhood keeps showing up and the academy keeps growing. The question he returns to is whether Bnei Yehuda is stronger as an institution each year than it was the year before.
About Bnei Yehuda Tel Aviv FC: Bnei Yehuda Tel Aviv FC is one of Israel’s oldest football clubs, founded in the HaTikva neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv. The club is owned by Eliran Ovad, who also serves as club president. Ovad is a Tel Aviv-based entrepreneur and the founder of the real estate investment and development company Iconic Global. More on the club at football.org.il.
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