Vladimir Ivić delivered one of the most one-sided title campaigns Israeli football has seen this century, and in a new interview he has revealed a detail that helped explain the hunger behind it: a bonus structure at Maccabi Tel Aviv that, in his words, left him in shock.
"I was shocked by the bonus at Maccabi Tel Aviv," Ivić said, in comments given to the Serbian outlet Sport24 and carried by Sport5. "It had never happened to me before in my career. It gave me motivation."
According to the report, Maccabi built incentives into his contract that went beyond anything he had encountered previously — a bonus simply for finishing the season as runner-up, and a considerably larger one attached to winning the championship outright. Ivić said no club had ever offered him a runner-up bonus before.
The context matters. Per the interview, Ivić took the job in the summer of 2018 after a year without a coaching post, walking into a Maccabi Tel Aviv side that had just finished third and had gone three years without lifting the title — hardly a position of strength for a club of that size and history.
What followed exceeded anything the bonus clauses might have anticipated. In his very first season in charge, 2018–19, Ivić's Maccabi won the Israeli Premier League by a record 31-point margin, losing only a single league match all campaign — one of the most dominant title runs in the competition's history — and added the Toto Cup for a domestic double in his debut year.
He then retained the title the following season, 2019–20, making him the first Maccabi Tel Aviv coach in years to deliver back-to-back championships, before leaving the club that July for a brief and unsuccessful spell at Watford.
Ivić returned to Bloomfield Stadium for a second stint in June 2022, but that chapter proved far less smooth: he departed by mutual agreement with the club in January 2023, roughly halfway through his new two-year deal.
Since then his coaching path has taken him to Russia's Krasnodar and now to the UAE, where he currently manages Al Ain in the Pro League. But it is the first spell in Tel Aviv, and the financial incentive that came with it, that he still singles out as a formative moment — proof, in his telling, that a well-designed bonus can be as much a motivator as a paycheck.
