How Israeli Soccer Fans Are a Different Species

I lived two streets from Bloomfield Stadium in Tel Aviv, and the first thing I figured out is that you can hear a Hapoel game from inside your apartment. Not the announcer, the fans. And the first time I heard it I genuinely thought something was wrong, because it did not sound like people having fun. It sounded like people who had a point to prove.

Back home in Cleveland/Texas, stadium noise goes up and down with the game. Big play, everyone screams. Nothing happening, everyone’s quiet, on their phone, getting a beer, and that’s normal. The cheering is a reaction to something.

These fans were not reacting to anything. They were just going the entire time. The singing never stopped, not when their team scored, just constantly, like the actual game was background music to it. I found out later they literally have an organized section in the stands, started by a bunch of fans years ago for the sole purpose of leading the songs. So the nonstop noise I kept hearing wasn’t random, it was organized – these people rehearse.

The walk home was when it really hit me. I ended up behind a group of guys who, like, half an hour after the final whistle were STILL arguing about a foul, a normal one, not even game-deciding. And it wasn’t cooling off, it was getting worse the farther we got from the stadium. Back home that conversation has a shelf life of maybe fifteen minutes before someone brings up dinner.

I tried to explain some American stuff to people there and it did not go well.

First I tried fantasy football and lost the guy in about thirty seconds.

“It’s not really about your team,” I said. “You draft players from different teams and you score points off their stats—”

“So you don’t care who wins.”

“You care about your players—”

“But not the game.”

“…Kind of? Not really?”

He walked off. Honestly, fair. Out loud it sounds insane.

Tailgating went even worse. I tried to explain that back home you drive to a parking lot hours before kickoff, set up a grill, eat, drink beers in the lot, and THEN go inside, and that this is, like, the best part.

“So the food is outside.”

“The best food is outside, yeah.”

“Why?”

And I had nothing. I still don’t have a good answer – there might not be one.

One day before a match I walked past a guy in his fifties in a Hapoel shirt, with his little kid next to him in the exact same shirt, just tiny. And neither of them looked like they were heading to a fun event. They looked like they were going somewhere they had to be.

So I looked the club up. Turns out Hapoel literally means “The Worker.” There’s a hammer and sickle on the badge. It goes back over a hundred years, tied to the old labor unions, and the hardcore fans wave flags with Che Guevara and Karl Marx on them and banners that say “Workers of the world, unite.” At a soccer game. I’m from Cleveland, where our whole thing is a guy who dresses up as a dog. This was a different level. Their big rival, Maccabi, is the establishment club, the rich successful one, and the two of them share the exact same stadium, which somehow makes it more intense, not less.

And after Hapoel lost? Back home you lose, you complain for fifteen minutes, you move on. These fans came back through the neighborhood completely silent. Not bad-night-out silent, heavier than that. And nobody seemed surprised by it, which took me forever to understand.

These people have been doing this exact thing, in this exact spot, longer than any of them have been alive, and then it clicked. Losing didn’t change what the shirt meant, because it was never really about the score.

I actually bought a Hapoel shirt at one point, mostly because it was red and looked good, which probably tells you everything about where my head was at. I wore it to a game and I don’t think I fooled anybody.

My dad wore a Browns jersey my whole life. It was his before I was even born, same as the team. I never thought about what that meant until I was standing two streets from a stadium in Jaffa, listening to a whole neighborhood that clearly felt about their club the way my dad felt about his. Just louder, and about a thousand times more intense.

Those fans are insane. I mean that as a compliment.