The Israel Football Association has filed what it is calling the gravest indictment ever brought against a club in the country's history, accusing Ironi Tiberias of arranging unauthorised intravenous infusions for players before a lower-league playoff match last season.
The charge sheet, drawn up by federation prosecutor Gal Bergman, accuses club figures of assisting in the use of prohibited substances and stimulants under aggravating circumstances, breaching federation regulations, and failing to comply with a prior disciplinary ruling. The federation says players were injected with saline solution without any medical professional present to supervise or monitor the process, ahead of a bottom-of-the-table playoff against Ashdod.
Shlomi Barzel, who heads the federation's public relations department, did not mince words in describing the scale of the case. "This is the most serious indictment ever filed against a club in the history of Israeli football," he said.
Named in the proceedings are suspended club owner Miki Bitan, head coach Eliran Chodeda, director Gavriel Cohen, fitness coach Shlomi Vadrero, technical director Chen Sol and staff member Aviv Givli — a roster that spans the club's ownership, coaching staff and administration.
Ironi Tiberias's lawyer, Eyal Yafe, dismissed the case as a wild overreaction to a routine medical procedure. "This is entirely legal — the federation is making a mountain out of a molehill," he said, pushing back hard when pressed on the legality of the infusions. "You're calling it illegal because someone received 40 or 50 millilitres without medical supervision?"
Yafe said he was standing by that position regardless of how the case unfolds. "I'm not changing my opinion. In my view, this will end in nothing," he said.
The federation's account of the quantities involved is notably higher than the figure Yafe cited in his defence: prosecutors allege that some players received well over 100 millilitres of fluid, though they have acknowledged working from what they describe as conservative estimates rather than exact medical documentation, since no clinician logged the doses at the time.
This is not Tiberias's first brush with sanction over the affair. The club's head coach and five players were previously suspended once the infusions came to light, and the club has already been handed a points deduction and a transfer ban in connection with the wider case — with relegation-adjacent consequences given how tightly it was fighting to avoid the drop.
The dispute has also spilled beyond the pitch and into open hostility with the federation's investigators. Tiberias has separately threatened a defamation lawsuit worth 500,000 shekels against the investigator handling the file, accusing him of prejudging the club's guilt and applying undue pressure on a young player during questioning — allegations the federation has rejected as a politically motivated media campaign.
With the indictment now formally filed, the case moves to Israeli football's disciplinary tribunal, where sanctions on the table reportedly range from further points deductions to relegation, depending on how the panel weighs the club's role in what happened before that fixture against Ashdod.
