Hapoel Tel Aviv's basketball club confirmed on Sunday that it will begin the coming season outside Israel. "At the moment — we will open the season in Sofia," the club told supporters, extending the arrangement that defined its historic first EuroLeague campaign.
The explanation came in an official statement issued in the club's name rather than attributed to any individual executive. "In light of the heating-up of the security situation, and in order to prepare in the best possible way for the coming season, it was decided to maintain activity bases both in Sofia and in Israel," the statement read.
The wording was deliberately provisional. The club said the main activity base will sit in Sofia "at this stage," that it will continue to monitor developments, and that if the security picture in Israel improves, the possibility of moving the principal base back home will be examined. No end date was given, and the club did not specify which competitions, or how many fixtures, the arrangement will cover.
The decision continues rather than begins Hapoel's Bulgarian chapter. Throughout 2025-26 — the club's debut season in the EuroLeague — home games in the competition were staged at Arena 8888 in Sofia, the hall formerly known as Arena Armeec, under the alternative-venue arrangements the league put in place for Israeli clubs while the security situation kept top-tier European basketball from being played in Israel.
That debut campaign was itself the product of a breakthrough. Hapoel earned their EuroLeague place by winning the 2024-25 EuroCup, sweeping Gran Canaria in the final.
In their first season among Europe's elite, they reached the 2026 playoffs, where they met Real Madrid, before the title was decided in Athens, where Olympiacos were crowned champions.
A squad member, quoted without being named in one of the Israeli reports, suggested the players had been braced for the news. "They said we'd start in Bulgaria and progress from there. There are still security matters, but we're going with whatever the team decides," the player said.
For Hapoel's supporters, the announcement lands as a familiar disappointment: a second consecutive season, at least at its outset, in which the biggest nights of the club's European life will begin some 1,600 kilometres from Tel Aviv. The club's own framing, though, leaves the door conspicuously open — the operative words remain "at the moment," with everything after that contingent on quieter times at home.
