Bnei Eilat's Youth B side did not lose a single league game all season, and this week the Red Sea club collected the reward: the Southern District Ne'arim Bet championship, ONE reported, capping an unbeaten campaign for the academy's 2011-born age group.
The numbers behind the title are stark. Bnei Eilat won 17 of their 20 league fixtures and drew the other three - a 90 percent success rate - to finish eight points clear of runners-up Maccabi Kiryat Gat when the table closed.
It was also the division's most productive attack. Eilat scored 96 goals across the season, the most of any team in the Southern District, though their defence was more porous than the record suggests: 21 goals conceded left them with only the second-best defensive record in the league, five worse than Kiryat Gat's.
David Shalom finished as the division's outright top scorer with 18 goals, with strike partner Oren Nachmani contributing 15 and Idan Shitz adding 13 more. Even the back line got in on it - defender Ian Leviv Sarhan scored three - while goalkeeper Uri Ganon anchored an unbeaten season between the posts.
"I think my team was very balanced," coach Shabtai Tassel said, according to ONE. "We had very strong attacking players, but also genuine defenders who gave everything."
Tassel, who has coached at the club for 15 years, also pointed to a quirk of the pandemic years the squad grew up in: "It's a little strange to say, but our advantage was that in Eilat the situation was relatively calm compared to the rest of the country" - a reference, he told the outlet, to the city's lighter Covid-19 disruption during the age group's formative seasons.
The title marks a breakthrough for Bnei Eilat's 2011 cohort, who are on course to progress from district level toward the National League. ONE noted the path is not entirely smooth, however: the club's other side in the same age group had a mixed season, leaving open questions about how the full cohort will cope once it steps up a level.
For Tassel personally, the championship is another marker of a rare kind of managerial longevity in youth football. "Fifteen years at one club," he said, "doesn't come easy."
