Position 3, 56 points, and the result everyone checks first is now theirs. The word is still not being said around the ground, which is how you know everyone is thinking it.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Maccabi Haifa they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Maccabi Haifa this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
“I want to win things, and I would like to do it here.” Nothing has been demanded and nothing has been threatened — but a boardroom at Maccabi Haifa hears a sentence like that exactly as it was built.
Squad3 Apr 2028
Words at Maccabi Haifa training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Cédric Don is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
“I watch every Maccabi Haifa game from here. That says everything about where my head is.” The loan at Irtysh runs its course, but his heart never made the trip.
16 shots, and a count that reads like a good afternoon until you check the other column. Strikers survive weeks like this on the understanding that the chances keep arriving; the day they stop is the day it becomes a problem.
Squad22 Nov 2027
Words at Maccabi Haifa training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Cédric Don is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Maccabi Haifa this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Nobody will confirm this and nothing else explains the last month of selections. A costly error buys a player a period of being second choice that is always longer than the error was.
5 shots, and a count that reads like a good afternoon until you check the other column. Strikers survive weeks like this on the understanding that the chances keep arriving; the day they stop is the day it becomes a problem.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Maccabi Haifa will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
“I never wanted to be anywhere else. There is unfinished business here.” Abdoulaye Seck commits to Maccabi Haifa for another 2 years.
Squad4 Oct 2027
Cédric Don falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Ben Lederman was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
8.51. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Maccabi Haifa can pretend not to have heard.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 21 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
At 28 the improving is meant to be over. It is not: 3 points better than the mark taken at the start of the year, which is the sort of thing that happens to players who take the boring parts of the job seriously.
Squad28 Jun 2027
Words at Maccabi Haifa training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Hamode Kanaan is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Ben Lederman was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 89 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
A season average of 7.52 at an age when most of his year group are still in the youth team. Maccabi Tel Aviv know what they have, and so, by now, does everybody else.
Mohamed Camara was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
10 without defeat on their own grass. The pitch has not changed; the crowd has — louder earlier, and quicker to sense when the opposition would rather be somewhere else.
11 goals in 24 games at Kryvbas — numbers that travel home faster than he does. Somebody at Maccabi Tel Aviv updates a spreadsheet every Monday, and it makes better reading each week.
It needed Ion Nicolăescu to find the net to bring anything home at all: 1‑1 against Maccabi Petach Tikva, and half the dressing room will call it a point won.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Maccabi Haifa this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad25 Jan 2027
Words at Maccabi Haifa training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Cédric Don is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
The paperwork is done long before the player is. Ben Lederman has agreed terms to come here when his current deal runs out, which means Maccabi Haifa have spent a summer's transfer budget on a phone call.
There is a particular warmth a ground reserves for a 22-year-old it feels ownership of. Cédric Don has it now, and everything he does for the rest of his time here will be measured against the goodwill he was handed for free.
A player who expected to start watched it instead. The manager will call it a decision for the team; Sean Goldberg will call it something else in private.
15 wins in a row changes how opponents warm up: quieter, more glances across. Runs end, everybody knows that — but nobody in this dressing room is planning for it.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 121 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Mohamed Camara provided it, and the 9.22 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
Two goals and a mark of 8.58 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
Match23 Jan 2027
Another one collected away from home
8 on the bounce on the road for Maccabi Tel Aviv. The coaches leave early, arrive at unlovely grounds in the dark, and keep coming home with three points.
Player ratings25 Jan 2027
Kervin Andrade, 21, plays like he has been here for years — 8.74
A mark of 8.74 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 21-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
A brace, and Raz Shlomo takes the afternoon — 8.82
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Raz Shlomo provided it, and the 8.82 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
Player ratings31 Aug 2026
Kervin Andrade, 21, plays like he has been here for years — 8.37
A mark of 8.37 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 21-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Maccabi Tel Aviv, and it is not being withdrawn.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Maccabi Tel Aviv this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad31 Aug 2026
Dor Peretz falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
At 21 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.