Arik Shtilman, the co-founder and chief executive of payments company Rapyd and the principal sponsor of Maccabi Tel Aviv's basketball club, has delivered a blistering assessment of the Recanati family only days after they completed the purchase that made them the club's majority owners. "From their perspective, the fans are an ATM that is supposed to fund them," he said on the Israeli podcast Anachnu BaMapa ("We're on the Map"), remarks reported by an Israeli sports outlet on Friday evening.
The criticism is rooted in a takeover battle Shtilman lost. In late May he agreed to acquire half of Fedanco Sports, the Federman family vehicle that held 29 per cent of the club, and with his partners proposed injecting around $30 million — an arrangement always contingent on the other shareholders declining their contractual right to buy the stake themselves.
The Recanati family exercised precisely that right of first refusal. On Wednesday they completed a purchase reported at roughly $50 million, lifting their holding from 29 to 58 per cent and leaving Shtilman outside the ownership structure.
In the podcast he characterised the move as financial opportunism rather than sporting ambition, claiming the family had bought the shares only to flip them at a higher price and that ego and control mattered more to them than the team. He said they feared change and refused to communicate with supporters.
He also gave his own account of a first shareholders' meeting, saying he had pressed for a larger budget while Udi Recanati was the only shareholder to oppose an increase and long-serving chairman Shimon Mizrahi backed him. These are Shtilman's descriptions of private discussions, and none of them has been independently corroborated.
His most concrete claims concerned recruitment. Had the refusal right not been exercised, he argued, Maccabi would probably have secured two frontline centres and a further guard by mid-July, naming Bruno Fernando, Richaun Holmes and Tomas Satoransky among the players who could have arrived, while Mike James and Shane Larkin were discussed but ruled out on basketball grounds.
He further suggested the budget had since been trimmed, linking a drawn-out renewal for Iffe Lundberg to the cost of the Yam Madar signing he says he pushed through. Neither the club nor any of the players named has commented on those assertions.
Shtilman made clear he has no intention of walking away from the sponsorship, under which the team competes as Maccabi Rapyd Tel Aviv on a seven-year agreement, but he promised to be a loud presence. "Rapyd will not remain on the shirt of an uncompetitive EuroLeague team," he said, claiming that roughly 80 per cent of supporters shared his view and vowing to return to the ownership picture sooner than people expect. With an appropriate budget for sporting director Claudio Coldebella and head coach Oded Katash, he argued, a Final Four challenge would be realistic.
The Recanati family were not quoted in response and had made no public reply by the time of publication. Their stated position remains the transaction itself: the business daily Globes has reported that the family intends to invest tens of millions of dollars in the playing budget over the coming years, and Udi Recanati has previously said he prefers to work quietly behind the scenes while Mizrahi speaks for the club. For now, the sharpest public account of Maccabi's boardroom comes from one side of a dispute whose other party has, at least publicly, chosen silence.
