Yavne's municipality has drawn a line under months of behind-the-scenes wrangling over the city's senior football set-up, brokering a formal merger between its two adult clubs, Maccabi Tzvi Yavne and Beitar Yavne, ONE reported.
The agreement was signed off at a meeting in the office of Mayor Roi Gabbay, bringing together two clubs that had both competed in Liga Alef South last season - one tier below Liga Leumit - and had increasingly found themselves competing for the same pool of players, sponsors and civic backing in a single small city.
Under the terms of the deal, the unified operation will play on under the Maccabi Tzvi Yavne name, with the club's existing badge and colours preserved. Beitar Yavne's registered association will stop fielding a separate senior team for the length of the agreement, folding its playing operation into its former cross-town rival.
The new leadership line-up blends figures from both sides. Asher Shetrit, who chaired Beitar Yavne, takes over as chairman of the merged body, while Asaf Ohana, formerly Maccabi's chief executive, stays on to run day-to-day and football operations. Felix Alimelech, Avi Ohion, Shalom Swissa and Avraham Biton were named to the board, with attorney Ram Sharon and Gal Pershker appointed to the audit committee, according to ONE.
Gabbay, who hosted the signing, framed the deal as a pooling of long-divided civic resources. "We successfully united forces and resources for one shared goal - to push Maccabi Yavne toward achievements," the mayor said.
The word "saga" in ONE's own framing points to a messier backdrop than a simple handshake. The merger comes after other Liga Bet clubs had separately pressed competing claims to Beitar Yavne's Liga Alef status, ONE reported, adding administrative uncertainty to a city that had ended up fielding two senior teams in the same division, sharing the same municipal stadium.
That overlap was itself a fairly recent development. Beitar Yavne reached Liga Alef for the first time in its history only ahead of the 2024-25 season, stepping into a vacancy left when Adom Ashdod withdrew from professional football, ONE reported at the time - a rapid rise that suddenly put two Yavne clubs in the same tier as Maccabi Tzvi Yavne, a club with a far longer history at that level.
For a city of under 60,000 people, running two parallel Liga Alef operations had strained both clubs' budgets and, at times, left playing squads on both sides thin - the kind of duplication municipal officials have periodically tried to resolve in Israel's lower leagues.
Practical details - fixtures, squad composition and exactly where the new Maccabi Tzvi Yavne will sit when Liga Alef South resumes - remain to be settled. But with the municipality's backing and a shared boardroom now in place, Yavne heads into the close season with one football club to build around rather than two competing for the same limited resources.
