Beitar Jerusalem beat AEK Larnaca 1-0 away in Cyprus on Thursday to open their Conference League second qualifying round tie, and by the numbers alone it is one of the rarer results in the club's European history: only the sixth away win Beitar have managed in 28 attempts in continental competition.
The only goal came in the 77th minute at the AEK Arena – George Karapatakis, when Brayan Carabalí curled a direct free kick past the Cypriot goalkeeper. The Colombian centre-back's strike arrived five minutes after AEK were reduced to ten men, with Mike van der Hoorn sent off in the 72nd minute.
ONE, reporting on the significance of the result, notes that Beitar have now won on the road in Europe for the first time in successive seasons — following last year's 2-1 victory at Sutjeska in the same competition. In a fixture list stretching back to 1996, that has never happened before.
The club's full away-win ledger in Europe, as laid out by ONE, reads: Floriana 5-1 (1996/97), Torshavn 1-0 (1998/99), WIT Georgia 4-1 (2000/01), Vasas 3-0 (2017/18), Sutjeska 2-1 (2025/26) and now AEK Larnaca 1-0 (2026/27) — six wins from 28 away trips over three decades.
The gaps between those results tell their own story: 17 years separated the win in Georgia from the one over Vasas in Hungary, and a further eight passed before Sutjeska. Beitar's away form in continental football has long been the club's soft underbelly, and Thursday's result, coming barely a year after ending that drought altogether, points to something changing.
It was also a first competitive outing as head coach for Almog Cohen, who moved from the club's sports director role into the dugout this summer after Beitar finished runners-up in the Israeli Premier League last season. Barak Itzhaki left the post at the end of the campaign.
The return leg is scheduled for July 30 — but not in Cyprus, and not in Jerusalem either. With UEFA continuing to bar European fixtures from being staged in Israel because of the security situation, Beitar will host AEK Larnaca at the Ilie Oană Stadium in Ploiești, Romania, a roughly 15,000-capacity ground the club has used before for matches designated as "home" games.
A one-goal cushion is a workable but hardly decisive lead to carry into that second leg. Still, for a club whose European away record has been defined more by long famines than by results like Thursday's, banking a clean sheet and a goal in Larnaca gives Beitar a rare position of comfort heading into the second half of the tie.
