Hapoel Tel Aviv are back in Europe for the first time in twelve years, and they marked the occasion by knocking out a club that had made continental football an annual habit. A 2-2 draw away to Ludogorets in Razgrad on Thursday night sealed a 4-2 aggregate victory in the Conference League second qualifying round, and sent the Reds through to face Poland's Katowice in the third round.
The night in Bulgaria was never going to be straightforward. Omri Altman found Emmanuel Boateng inside the area in the 16th minute and the Ghanaian striker finished coolly to put Hapoel 3-0 up on aggregate, seemingly putting the tie beyond reach before it had properly begun.
Ludogorts hit back hard. Bernard Tekpetey pulled one back in the 47th minute and Alberto Salido made it 2-1 on the night seven minutes later, turning a comfortable evening into a nervous one and briefly threatening to drag the tie to extra time.
Boateng settled it. His second goal of the night, in the 58th minute, restored Hapoel's two-goal cushion on aggregate and proved decisive, even as Ludogorets pushed for a third that never came.
The other pivotal moment came earlier, in the 39th minute, when goalkeeper Assaf Tzur guessed correctly and saved a penalty from Kwadwo Duah. Had that gone in, the tie would have looked very different heading into the second-half turnaround.
The aggregate scoreline was built in Tel Aviv a week earlier, when Hapoel won the first leg 2-0 at Bloomfield Stadium through goals from Altman and centre-back Chico, giving Elyaniv Barda's side a cushion they never entirely relinquished.
As ONE's coverage framed it, eliminating Ludogorets ranks as the biggest achievement of Barda's spell at Hapoel Tel Aviv so far. The Bulgarian champions had reached the group or league phase of a European competition in every campaign since 2015/16 — a run of continental pedigree that ended on Thursday night against a club operating on a fraction of their budget.
A senior club figure summed up the scale of the result afterwards: "We defeated an opponent with a budget four times larger than ours. We've maintained the club's tradition and achieved something enormous here. We're not stopping here," they said, according to Walla! Sport.
There was also a note of caution attached to the celebration, with the same source warning: "If we don't approach Katowice with the exact same mentality we brought to Ludogorets, we'll have a problem."
Barda, who took charge of Hapoel Tel Aviv in December 2024 after leading Hapoel Be'er Sheva to a State Cup and a Toto Cup crown as well as a Conference League group-stage run, has now guided the Reds from the second tier to the brink of the competition's group phase in little over a year.
Hapoel's reward is a third qualifying round meeting with GKS Katowice, who overturned a 1-2 first-leg deficit against Slovakia's Žilina by winning the second leg 3-1. It is the first time Hapoel Tel Aviv have played in Europe since a 2014-15 Europa League qualifying exit to Astana, and one more two-legged tie now stands between them and a first group-stage campaign in the club's history.
