Hapoel Tel Aviv's basketball club is facing a legal challenge over the one asset that predates every player, coach and owner it has ever had: its own name. Shaul Eisenberg, who controlled the club for roughly two decades until 2007, says the rights to "Hapoel Tel Aviv" are his, not the team's, and he has taken the fight to court.
Eisenberg's attorney, Dr. Matan Gutman, laid out the claim on ONE's "Sihat HaYom" programme: "The Hapoel Tel Aviv name belongs to Shaul Eisenberg." It is a blunt line, but it rests on a specific paper trail going back to 2009.
According to Gutman, when Eisenberg's ownership era ended, he reached an agreement, brokered through the late Ofer Eliahu, under which the Hapoel Ussishkin fan association was permitted to use the "Hapoel Tel Aviv" name only on condition that the association itself exclusively held and managed the team. Should that arrangement change, Gutman says, the naming rights were to revert to Eisenberg.
That condition is now at the centre of the dispute. Hapoel Tel Aviv recently confirmed that Ofer Yannay, the businessman who has bankrolled the club's rise into the EuroLeague alongside partners including Gili Raanan, Micky Malka and Alan Howard, would become majority shareholder with 51% of the club — leaving the fan association holding a minority 19% stake.
Eisenberg's camp argues that handover breaches the 2009 terms outright. Per Ynet, he sent an urgent letter to association chairman Rami Cohen, to Yannay and to the club's board, asserting that once the association ceded control to a third party, the club forfeited its right to trade under the Hapoel Tel Aviv name at all.
The dispute has since moved from warning letters to an actual courtroom filing. Eisenberg, represented by Gutman and attorney Nir Friedman, has lodged a NIS 12.6 million claim in the Tel Aviv District Court against Hapoel Ussishkin, the basketball club itself, Yannay, Avi Zeidenberg, the team's management company, attorney Roei Miller and the widow of the late Ofer Eliahu.
Within that claim, Eisenberg is separately demanding NIS 100,000 a month for continued use of the club's name for as long as the rights remain outside his hands — a running toll rather than a one-off payment.
It is a familiar fight for Hapoel Tel Aviv's basketball operation. Eisenberg has raised versions of this same ownership claim before, including during the club's earlier financial troubles, but the stakes are higher this time: the team he is challenging is no longer a struggling domestic outfit but a EuroLeague side attracting billionaire investment.
ONE reports that a court hearing on the matter has been set for September, with Gutman expressing confidence that Eisenberg's position will hold up. Hapoel Tel Aviv has not issued a detailed public rebuttal of the specific claims aired on "Sihat HaYom."
For now, the club continues to play, train and market itself as Hapoel Tel Aviv while the question of who actually owns that name sits before a judge — an unusual footnote to a summer in which the team's on-court ambitions have never looked bigger.
