Franck Rivollier is training with Hapoel Petah Tikva again this pre-season, but before he plays a single competitive minute back in the yellow-and-black, the forward has had to account for a year spent in the shirt of the club's fiercest local rival.
"Maccabi? I understand the fans, it was the option I had," Rivollier told ONE, addressing head-on the anger that greeted his 2025 switch to Maccabi Petah Tikva, the club on the other side of one of Israeli football's bitterest city derbies.
The 25-year-old had first arrived at Hapoel in January 2025 from Bulgarian side Spartak Varna, helping the club to the Liga Leumit title and promotion back to the top flight. Instead of staying to enjoy the fruits of that promotion, he crossed the divide to Maccabi Petah Tikva that summer, a move that was never going to sit easily with Hapoel's supporters.
At Maccabi he did the job well enough — 32 appearances and six goals across the season, according to figures reported by Africa Soccer, form that helped drag Maccabi themselves up into Ligat Ha'al for the coming campaign. But on July 17, with his contract up, Rivollier signed for Hapoel again as a free agent, this time on a deal running to June 2027.
That back-and-forth is precisely what he was asked to explain, and his answer to ONE was not evasive: he says he grasps exactly why fans felt betrayed, but frames the Maccabi move as pragmatic rather than personal — the door that was open at a moment when Hapoel's was not.
"I'm excited, really excited, because it's a new league for me," he said of the season ahead — a pointed line, since his first Hapoel spell coincided with the club's promotion push in Liga Leumit rather than the top division itself. Ligat Ha'al with Hapoel will, in that sense, be uncharted territory.
He was equally direct about the scale of his and the club's ambitions this time around, telling ONE: "We don't have a team that's just come here to survive in the league," and describing a bond with the group that he says was there "from the first day" of his return.
Personally, his targets are simple enough: goals, assists, and a place as one of the team's key men rather than a squad number — he wears 45 — that just makes up the numbers.
Born in Saint-Étienne and eligible for both France and Cameroon through his mother, Rivollier came up through the Troyes and Lyon academies before a spell in Stade Rennais's youth system, where he has spoken of training alongside players who went on to bigger things, among them Eduardo Camavinga and Jeremy Doku.
His footballing heroes growing up were Samuel Eto'o and Didier Drogba, and he told ONE he has a distant family connection to Eto'o through his Cameroonian mother — a link he mentions with evident pride rather than as a boast.
Whatever the noise around last year's derby switch, Hapoel Petah Tikva have chosen to bring him back regardless, and Rivollier now gets the chance to answer his critics in the way that tends to work best in football: on the pitch, in the league he says he can't wait to finally experience in Hapoel's colours.
