For the best part of two decades, generations of Maccabi Tel Aviv players and staff grabbed a coffee or a sandwich from the small cafeteria Zion Blas ran at the club's Kiryat Shalom training complex. Now Blas is suing the club at the Tel Aviv District Court for 520,482 shekels, saying his life's work there ended with a demolition notice and nothing to show for it.
According to the claim, filed through attorney Shay Elias and reported by ONE, Blas found what had been a neglected, abandoned shed on the training ground and rehabilitated it himself into a working cafeteria, operating it for years with the club's knowledge. The suit describes Blas, who says he cannot read or write, as a simple, devoted fixture of the site who helped out with maintenance and equipment care well beyond his role running the kiosk.
At the centre of the dispute is a licensing agreement Blas signed on 19 May 2002. Elias says his client signed it under rushed circumstances while boarding a team flight, believing he was securing long-term rights to run the cafeteria, when the document he was later shown differed from what he understood he had agreed to and technically expired within a year. Maccabi nonetheless let him continue operating for another two decades.
The cafeteria's operations stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic and never fully resumed. On 31 December 2023, Blas received a formal letter from the club giving him 14 days to vacate the building, stating that the permission granted under the 2002 agreement had long since lapsed and that Maccabi intended to demolish the structure to build something else for internal club use. The building has since been torn down.
Blas's claim breaks down to 420,482 shekels in lost profits, calculated from the cafeteria's average net income between 2014 and 2020 and projected forward, plus 100,000 shekels for emotional distress and non-pecuniary harm. He is also asking the court to void both the 2002 licensing agreement and a 2016 'volunteer declaration' he signed, arguing neither reflects a genuine, informed agreement given his inability to read.
Speaking on ONE's Sicha HaYom programme, Elias said Blas tried for a long time to resolve the matter quietly through letters before turning to lawyers, and described his client, now in poor health, as someone who gave the club decades of loyal, largely unpaid service. "Everyone who was at the club was in complete shock at this conduct," Elias said of the reaction to how the eviction was carried out.
Maccabi, represented by attorney Yael Margelit, maintains that no employer-employee relationship ever existed between the club and Blas and has suggested the dispute be resolved privately rather than in court. "The door will always remain open to return and meet with club management to discuss matters cordially," Margelit said. According to Elias, Maccabi offered in 2024 to forgive any outstanding debt and provide some compensation, but he says that offer never materialised into anything concrete for his client.
The case now awaits Maccabi's formal response. Both sides, per ONE's report, expect the matter to end in a negotiated settlement rather than a full trial.
