Shai Aharon, Hapoel Jerusalem's professional director, has broken his silence on the club's chaotic 2025/26 season in a wide-ranging interview with ONE ahead of the new campaign, admitting he initially believed coach Ziv Arie's departure was a mistake -- before concluding it may have been exactly what kept the club in Ligat Ha'al.

Arie, who had guided Hapoel Jerusalem up from the second tier and spent seven years in the job, stepped down mid-season after results collapsed. "I didn't think Ziv needed to leave," Aharon told ONE, describing it as one of the hardest moments of his tenure at the club.

Aharon said the two men later spoke following a defeat to Kiryat Shmona, and it was Arie himself who persuaded him the change had been necessary. "Maybe that's exactly why we survived," Aharon told ONE -- a striking admission that parting with a long-serving coach, however painful, may have given the club the jolt it needed to beat relegation.

The numbers behind the crisis were stark. According to Ynet's reporting on Arie's exit, his final campaign yielded just 21 points from a possible 81, with only four wins and 23 goals scored all season -- a return worse than almost the entire division, with only relegation-threatened Bnei Reineh managing fewer goals.

Arie's long-time assistant of four years, Lior Zada, 48, was promoted to replace him and switched the team to a noticeably more attacking approach than his predecessor's cautious setup, Ynet reported at the time.

Aharon also addressed the messy fallout involving forward Cedric Don, telling ONE the widely reported dressing-room incident "was based on a real story" -- while disputing parts of the published account and noting that comments at least as harsh had been directed at other players without making headlines. Don has since left the club, moving on to Maccabi Haifa in 2026.

On one of Israeli football's more sensitive subjects, the Jerusalem derby, Aharon was unambiguous. "There is a policy not to transfer players to Beitar," he said, framing it as a matter of respecting the rivalry and protecting supporters on both sides of the capital's divide rather than a purely footballing call.

He also lifted the lid on the club's finances, revealing that Hapoel Jerusalem begins every season with a deficit of at least five million shekels. With no private owner underwriting the books, the club still leans on donations from Israel and abroad -- support Aharon says has been shrinking in recent years.

That financial squeeze feeds directly into recruitment. Aharon told ONE that signing foreign players has become harder than at any point he can recall, with families increasingly reluctant to relocate to Israel even after the club shows them video presentations and puts them in touch with current squad members for reassurance.

Aharon used the interview, too, to push back on the gulf between Arie's public image and the man he worked alongside for years, arguing responsibility for the caricature that formed around the coach was shared three ways -- between Arie himself, the club, and the media that covered him.

It is a rare piece of self-criticism from inside a club that spent much of last season fighting to stay afloat, and it frames Hapoel Jerusalem's build-up to 2026/27 around a blunt message from its own sporting director: survival came at a cost, but the decisions that caused the pain may be the same ones that kept the club up.