Avraham Bachar turned 85 on Thursday - the exact anniversary of his birth in 1941 - and rather than let it pass quietly, ONE gathered four people who worked alongside him across Israeli youth football to say what he meant to them.
Bachar is one of the sport's quieter institutions: a left winger who never became a household name as a player but who spent the following half-century shaping the coaches and teenagers who did.
He came up through Maccabi Tel Aviv's youth ranks and played for the first team between 1960 and 1964, before finishing his playing days at Hapoel/Samson Tel Aviv and retiring in 1968 at 27.
The coaching career that followed dwarfed the playing one. Bachar took charge of Maccabi Jaffo in 1975 and Hapoel Tel Aviv the following season, then moved through youth departments at Hapoel Tel Aviv, Maccabi Tel Aviv, Hapoel Kfar Saba, Hapoel Herzliya, Maccabi Ramat Chen and Hapoel Bat Yam over the decades that followed.
His most enduring imprint, though, came in a national team tracksuit: from 1994 to 2006 he worked with Israel's boys' and youth national sides, a twelve-year stretch that took in more than 150 official matches.
That body of work was formally recognised in August 2019, when President Reuven Rivlin presented Bachar with the President's Award in honour of his decades of contribution to youth football education in Israel.
More recently he served eight seasons as professional director of Hapoel Herzliya's youth department, from 2017, before stepping back this year into an advisory role with the club - the perch from which, at 85, he is still watching the game he helped build.
For the birthday piece, ONE turned to four figures whose careers intersected with his. Zeev "Zavik" Zalzer, the former player, coach and now football commentator, worked beside Bachar on the youth national teams for a dozen years and recalled him as a player first - "technical, quick, a winger who executed passes with precision and always set others up."
Yossi Shvachon, who trained under Bachar before becoming a coach himself, put it more bluntly: working with him, he said, was the moment he realised how much about football he still didn't understand - crediting Bachar with instilling tactical awareness alongside the values that came with it.
Meyan Negev, who now runs Hapoel Herzliya's youth department where Bachar still advises, called his continued presence there "a great privilege for us all." Amit Artzi, the professional manager at Hapoel Kfar Saba who coached under Bachar earlier in his career, said what stayed with him most was less tactical than personal - "a human approach" to coaching young players.
Little of what Bachar built is visible on a highlights reel. It sits instead in the coaching staffs and federation programmes now run by people he trained thirty and forty years ago - which is precisely why, on his 85th birthday, it was they who did the talking.
