Bnei Eilat's new owners are not shy about the scale of their ambition. Speaking on ONE's Sicha Hayom programme, the trio behind the club's takeover — known by the names Dodo, Nelly and Tory — said their aim is simple to state and brutal to execute: win promotion every single season until Bnei Eilat reach the national league.
The takeover itself began almost by accident. The group had acquired a business interest in Eilat and initially planned only to sponsor the club from the sidelines. It was the city's mayor, they said, who pushed them to go further and take full control of the operation instead of merely writing cheques from a distance.
Since then they have put roughly 1 million shekels into the project, a serious sum for a club playing in Liga Bet, the fourth tier of Israeli football and two full divisions below the Ligat Ha'al summit.
The most significant move so far has been off the pitch. Kobi Refua, a coach with senior experience at Hapoel Tel Aviv, Bnei Yehuda and Ironi Kiryat Shmona, has been brought in as sporting director with sweeping authority over football matters, including the choice of head coach. The owners describe him as the figure the entire project now runs through.
Eilat's football history offers a cautionary backdrop. The city's teams have repeatedly found Liga Alef, the tier directly above, a difficult place to survive — Bnei Eilat's own best campaign, a third-place finish in 2010-11 that carried them into the promotion playoffs, remains the high-water mark from a club founded only in 2006. The new owners say they are alive to that record but insist they have assembled, in their words, a Liga Bet squad built specifically to win Liga Alef promotion fights rather than merely reach the division and stall there.
The transfer business backs up the rhetoric. Striker Gil Yitzhak, who came through the Beitar Jerusalem academy before spells including Maccabi Jaffa, has signed for what Sport5 reported as a historic fee by the club's standards, on terms said to be worth around 450,000 shekels for the season — well above what a fourth-tier side would typically pay.
Yitzhak's deal is also understood to carry a goals-based bonus, though the owners have not disclosed the figure attached to it.
Alongside him, midfielder Gadi Kanyuk arrives after time at Hapoel Haifa, giving Refua's rebuilt squad experience from considerably higher up the pyramid than Liga Bet football usually attracts.
The ownership group has pointed to the template set by Alon Barak's earlier stint building Bnei Eilat as the model they want to replicate and improve on.
None of it guarantees anything on the pitch — Liga Bet is unforgiving and the step up to Liga Alef has broken bigger Eilat projects before. But with money, a recognised sporting director and a three-to-four-year clock now running, Bnei Eilat's new owners have at least made clear there will be no quiet, incremental version of this plan.
