Two and a half years ago, Hapoel Tel Aviv gave up on Bubacarr Tambedou after barely four months. Now the Gambian forward is one of the hottest scorers in European qualifying football, and the Israeli club that discarded him is the punchline in his story, Sport5 reports.

Hapoel signed Tambedou from Estonia's Paide Linnameeskond in January 2024, a move TheNerveAfrica reported was worth around €100,000 to Paide at the time, though Sport5's own figure for the deal runs closer to €150,000. Whatever the exact number, it barely mattered: he made just six appearances in yellow-and-black before the club released him within four months.

The player himself has since described that spell in bleak terms. Sport5 quotes him saying he felt completely alone in Israel, without proper language support or coaching stability behind him, to the point that he considered walking away from the contract altogether: "I couldn't continue like this... maybe you pay me half and I just go."

What followed did not immediately look like vindication. Tambedou joined Georgian side Dinamo Batumi in the summer of 2024 and scored just three goals across a full season there, numbers that read like confirmation of Hapoel's decision rather than a rebuttal of it.

Everything changed when he returned to Estonia in January 2025, signing for FCI Levadia. Last season he managed a respectable 8 goals and 3 assists. This season, per Sport5, he has exploded: 14 goals in 20 league matches in Estonia's top flight, the Meistriliiga, none of them from the penalty spot, working out to roughly a goal every 98 minutes.

He has carried that form into Europe. Levadia thrashed Welsh side Caernarfon Town 5-0 in each leg of their Conference League first qualifying round, a 10-0 aggregate rout in which Tambedou scored and assisted across both matches.

The bigger statement came in the second qualifying round, away to Sweden's IFK Göteborg, a side from a stronger domestic league than Estonia's. Levadia won 2-1, with Tambedou setting up the opener for Brazilian forward Wendell by winning a duel down the left flank before Göteborg conceded an own goal late on. Sport5 puts his combined output in this season's qualifying campaign at 3 goals and 3 assists from three matches.

Off the pitch, his time in Estonia has not been without complications. Sport5 reports that Tambedou was convicted of theft in Estonia in 2023 — taking around €105 worth of goods from a store — and fined €120, a conviction that went on to complicate the renewal of his visa.

None of that has slowed his football. Levadia hold his registration on a contract running through December 2026, and Sport5's framing is blunt: a player once quietly released by an Israeli club as a non-factor is now scoring at a rate that could put him on the radar of considerably bigger leagues before his deal is up.

For Hapoel Tel Aviv, there is no controversy to answer for — plenty of young strikers arrive from smaller leagues and fail to adapt, and six games was a fair trial by most standards. But as a footnote to their squad-building history, Tambedou's turnaround, from a player begging to leave on reduced terms to one chasing a share of Estonia's scoring charts and embarrassing a Swedish top-flight side in Europe, is a striking one.