A month and a half after buying his way into Maccabi Tel Aviv's ownership structure only to be squeezed straight back out of it, tech entrepreneur Arik Shtilman is sounding the alarm over the club's finances - and putting a fresh, rival offer on the table to take control himself.
Appearing on ONE's "Sichat HaYom" podcast, Shtilman said Israel's most decorated basketball club could be heading toward bankruptcy if its ownership and spending patterns do not change, describing its finances as sitting atop what he called "an enormous pit, historic in scale."
According to ONE's report, Shtilman put projected losses at around 100 million shekels for the coming season alone, 70 to 80 million shekels the year after that, and 50 to 70 million shekels annually even in a season when Maccabi returns to the EuroLeague - warning that cumulative losses could run into the hundreds of millions of shekels over the coming years without new capital and new management.
The warning lands against a messy backdrop. Shtilman, the founder and chief executive of payments company Rapyd, was brought into Maccabi's ownership picture in May as part of a deal to take a 50% stake in Fedanco Sports, the investment vehicle through which the Federman family held roughly 29% of the club.
That plan collapsed when the Recanati family, which already controlled the largest share of Maccabi, exercised its right of first refusal on the Federman stake, paying an estimated $50 million to buy out the family directly rather than let Shtilman in alongside them - leaving him on the outside of the ownership structure after barely six weeks.
Rather than walk away, Shtilman has since gone in the opposite direction: tabling a non-binding offer of $100 million for the Recanati family's own 58% controlling stake, held through Naftali Investments - a valuation that matches what the Recanatis themselves paid to seize control from the Federmans. His proposal reportedly calls for 30 days of due diligence and a close within 90 days, subject to corporate approvals.
The counter-bid arrives as the Recanatis are separately said to be negotiating a sale of half of their own holding - 50% of their stake - to American businessman Jason Levin for around $50 million, a sign that the family currently running the club is itself weighing how much of it to keep.
Shtilman's bankruptcy warning has to be read in that context. He is not a neutral outside observer but an active rival claimant for control, and he has argued publicly that the Recanatis lack the resources and long-term plan to keep Maccabi solvent - making the case that only new ownership, implicitly his own group, can head off a slide toward insolvency.
Even so, the figures he cited would be alarming for a club with more European and domestic titles than any other in Israeli basketball, and they add a financial dimension to what has already been a turbulent off-court summer around the team's ownership.
Neither Maccabi Tel Aviv nor the Recanati family had issued a public response to Shtilman's remarks at the time of ONE's report, and the loss projections have not been independently verified against the club's own financial disclosures.
