Omri Kende has spent years being asked about the goals he didn't score and the tackles he didn't make. On Channel 13's reality show Power Couple, he was asked about something far harder to admit: the lies he told to stay in the team.

"I grew up crooked, I grew up on lies in football, I grew up on schemes," the former Hapoel Tel Aviv right-back said, according to ONE. "I would lie to players that there was no training, so they wouldn't show up — when really there was, just so I could be in the lineup."

It is a strikingly candid confession from a player who, for a period, was one of the most promising young defenders to come out of Hapoel Petah Tikva's academy, graduating to the senior side at just 16 and a half before a 2008 move to Hapoel Tel Aviv reshaped his career.

At Hapoel Tel Aviv, Kende was part of the club's dominant run at the turn of the decade, winning the Israeli championship in 2009/10 and three consecutive State Cups. He later played in Romania for Astra Giurgiu, and back home for Hapoel Haifa, Maccabi Netanya and Hapoel Jerusalem before retiring.

But running alongside the trophies, Kende has said in this and previous interviews, was a gambling addiction that consumed him. On Power Couple he described the compulsion bluntly, saying he came "from the world of gambling," chasing urges at the expense of those closest to him.

The addiction was not new information — in 2011, Kende was reportedly targeted in an extortion scheme by figures tied to organized crime over debts he had run up gambling, a case that drew police attention at the time. In a separate interview cited by Srugim, Kende has said his club owner once handed him a check to cover a 200,000-shekel debt before he had even finished explaining it.

He has also spoken previously about a heart attack he suffered in 2016 while filming a television production, an episode he has described as a breaking point that led to two years of depression at home.

On the show, Kende turned to fellow contestant Assi Buzaglo — himself a former footballer — as the person he felt able to be fully honest with, calling him his "place of refuge." He contrasted that ease with his relationship with his wife, Doreen, saying he still struggles to hold her gaze: "My wife Doreen I don't understand in the eyes, and you I understand in the eyes."

Kende framed his current life as a daily discipline rather than a finished transformation. "Every morning I wake up and look in the mirror and say: today I won't lie," he said — a small ritual, by his own account, against the habits that once shaped an entire career.

These days, according to other reporting on his post-retirement life, Kende lectures to young people about the dangers of gambling and online betting, presenting his career as a cautionary tale rather than a highlight reel.