Hapoel Beer Sheva's push for the Champions League league phase runs into one of European football's more sentimental late-career stories this week: Marko Arnautović, now 37, lining up for Red Star Belgrade with the trophy he has chased his whole career finally within reach.
ONE reports that Arnautović, who joined Red Star as a free agent after his Inter Milan contract expired, sees the club he supported as a boy as his last realistic route to Champions League silverware — a motivation the Austrian has made no secret of since arriving in Belgrade.
Beer Sheva and Red Star meet in the third qualifying round, with the first leg in Beer Sheva on August 4 and the return in Belgrade on August 11. The winner advances to the league phase; the loser drops into the Europa League qualifying path.
Ran Kozuch's side, fresh off winning the Israeli Premier League title, reached this stage by beating Vikingur Reykjavik 3-2 on aggregate in round two — a tie they trailed after a 2-1 defeat in Iceland before winning 2-0 at home to go through.
Red Star arrive in far more emphatic form. They thrashed Northern Irish champions Larne 9-0 on aggregate in the previous round, capped by a 5-0 demolition in Belgrade in which Arnautović scored twice, either side of the break, to go with strikes from Aleksandar Katai and Osman Bukari.
Arnautović's move to Red Star last summer was itself a story soaked in emotion. He turned down a reported €6 million offer from boyhood suitors Rapid Vienna to sign in Belgrade instead, telling reporters at his unveiling that he had promised the late Siniša Mihajlović — his mentor at Bologna, who died of leukaemia in 2022 — that he would one day wear the red and white.
"I had promised Siniša I would come to Red Star, and now I am here," Arnautović said at the time, recalling how the pair used to talk about the club daily during their time together.
The striker has since become Austria's most-capped and highest-scoring international, finishing his national-team career with 49 goals in 137 appearances before retiring after Austria's last-32 exit to Spain at the 2026 World Cup.
For Beer Sheva, the assignment is stark: contain a Serbian champion in ruthless scoring form, spearheaded by a 37-year-old still adding to a résumé that includes a Champions League winner's medal earned on the bench with Inter in 2010, and stop him doing it again on Israeli soil in the first leg.
A result at home on August 4 would give Kozuch's side something concrete to defend in Belgrade a week later, and keep alive a run that has already outlasted one European campaign this summer.
