Hapoel Haifa's squad flies home from its pre-season camp in Bulgaria on Monday to an unwelcome discovery: according to a report on Sunday evening, the club is currently barred from its Beit Nagler training complex. Haifa Municipality is said to be withholding access over an alleged unpaid debt of thousands of shekels, a decision that lands six days before the club opens its Toto Cup campaign against Maccabi Haifa in the city derby next Saturday.
The story was first reported by a local Haifa outlet before the club issued a lengthy, and unusually bitter, public response — one that did not dispute the existence of a payment question, but attacked the city's treatment of the club root and branch.
"After cutting the annual support budget for Hapoel Haifa to 29,000 shekels — roughly our annual socks budget — the municipality continues to turn a cold shoulder to the club," the club said in the statement. "Unfortunately, we feel like an unwanted, unloved stepchild in the city, to put it mildly."
The statement went further, accusing the city of "failing one of the oldest and most important institutions in the city, in its 103rd year," and of forcing the club "to compete with unequal tools against rivals budgeted in the millions of shekels, including facilities provided free or subsidised by municipalities." The club also questioned the timing, calling the emergence of the ban days before the derby "puzzling."
There is history here, and it is strikingly recent. In the summer of 2025 the same municipality barred the same club from the same Beit Nagler complex over a debt then put at roughly NIS 100,000, saying training could resume once it was settled; the club responded at the time that it pays more than NIS 2 million a year for its use of Beit Nagler and Sammy Ofer Stadium and would settle any bill on formal demand. That episode was resolved; its reappearance a year on suggests a structural rather than incidental problem in the relationship.
What is missing, this time, is the city's side. Haifa Municipality had issued no statement on the fresh bar by Sunday night, and the precise size and age of the debt now claimed has not been confirmed on the record. Until it speaks, the club's furious framing stands alone.
The stakes are immediate either way. The Toto Cup derby against Maccabi Haifa next Saturday is the club's first competitive fixture of the 2026-27 season, and a side that lands from Bulgaria on Monday with its training base in doubt has, at best, a badly disrupted match week. If the last round of this fight is any guide, a payment — and a formal demand for one — would end it quickly.
