Lila Soto: Hey — I have to ask you something before we even get into this. If I told you a football club founded in 1906 had never once been relegated across its entire history, what's your first instinct? Like, what story does your brain tell?
Iris Holm: Dynasty. Consistent quality. Big market, big wallet.
Lila Soto: And that's exactly the story that I think is wrong — or at least, mm, incomplete. Maccabi Tel Aviv, 26 league championships, 24 State Cups, never relegated, oldest club in Israel. But the frame that keeps nagging at me is: this isn't about consistent excellence. It's about getting there first and making the gap structurally impossible to close.
Iris Holm: First-mover advantage that never stopped compounding.
Lila Soto: Right — and the timing is almost absurd when you look at it. The club emerges from the Maccabi sports movement, they're playing competitive football before a formal league exists, and then 1929 arrives: the Football Association gets FIFA recognition, and Maccabi wins their first official trophy that exact year. Like the structure formalized around a club that was already dominant. So today we're trying to figure out — what does a head start in 1906 actually do to the shape of a sport more than a century later?
Iris Holm: And whether any rival — Hapoel, Beitar Jerusalem — could actually break it, or whether that question is already foreclosed.
Lila Soto: Yeah. That's the part I'm genuinely not sure about.
Iris Holm: The 'foreclosed' question is actually the key. Think of it this way — not football, just a neighborhood. One coffee shop opens on the best corner in 1906. No competition for twenty years. By the time a second shop opens, the first one has the loyal regulars, the trained staff pipeline, the lease no one can touch. That's Maccabi Tel Aviv. Founded in Jaffa, first Jewish club in local competition by 1922, and the formal league didn't even exist yet.
Lila Soto: So they were the only shop on the block for literally decades.
Iris Holm: And then 1929 happens. The Israel Football Association gets established, FIFA recognition lands — and Maccabi wins their first official trophy that same year. The rules formalize, and the club already holding the corner wins the first sanctioned prize.
Lila Soto: Okay but — and I think this is what a lot of people would push back on — were they dominant because they were genuinely the best side, or because no one else had organized enough to actually challenge them yet?
Iris Holm: Exactly the latter. That's the whole point of first-mover advantage. 'Best' is almost irrelevant when you're the only structured institution in the room.
Lila Soto: Which means — mm, I mean, the compounding starts before competition even arrives. Youth academies, fan membership, identity infrastructure — all of it building while rivals are still figuring out how to hold a meeting.
Iris Holm: And the Maccabi sports movement gave them that scaffolding pre-built. The ideological network was already there. They didn't have to invent belonging — they inherited it.
Lila Soto: So when the IFA formalized in 1929, Maccabi didn't *enter* the system — they basically *became* the reference point the system organized around.
Iris Holm: Right. And the never-relegated record is the residue of that. Not proof of excellence. Proof that the head start never stopped paying interest.
Lila Soto: But here's the wrinkle — Hapoel Tel Aviv had ideology too. Like, equally fierce, maybe fiercer. Labor Zionism, working-class roots, the Histadrut — the entire General Federation of Labour — backing them. And yet.
Iris Holm: Never built the institution.
Lila Soto: Never built it. And I keep turning that over because — mm, the Histadrut was genuinely powerful. This wasn't a fringe movement. So why didn't that cultural intensity become structural dominance?
Iris Holm: The Histadrut is an external patron. That's the whole difference. The Maccabi sports movement wasn't backing Maccabi Tel Aviv — it *was* Maccabi Tel Aviv. The ideology wasn't borrowed, it was load-bearing.
Lila Soto: Oh — that's actually — wait, yeah. So Hapoel's identity came from outside the club. Federation money, federation politics. The club was an expression of the Histadrut, not the other way around.
Iris Holm: Exactly. And Beitar Jerusalem shows the same ceiling — strong right-wing identity, real fan intensity, but the organizational infrastructure never matched the noise. Ideology without internal architecture just makes louder fans.
Lila Soto: Which is why the Star of David logo, the Maccabees name — that symbolic identity wasn't decoration. It was the membership mechanism. It's what made a kid in Buenos Aires or Paris feel like the club was *theirs*. And none of that accrued to Hapoel. And then — I mean, there's a very concrete version of this. Picture a 16-year-old midfielder from Petah Tikva in 2019, deciding between Maccabi's youth academy and Hapoel's — same coaching staff, similar wages — and Maccabi's one unstated credential is: in over a hundred years, we have never been relegated. Hapoel has. He signs with Maccabi.
Iris Holm: That's not sentiment. That's a never-relegated record doing live competitive work in 2019.
Lila Soto: And the part that makes all of this worse — we haven't even touched what happens when private investment enters Israeli football in the late eighties and that ideological identity suddenly becomes a commercial asset on a global scale. That's where this compounds in a direction nobody predicted.
Iris Holm: That's exactly where it locks in permanently. Late eighties, state-linked sport union funding dries up, private capital enters — and the question every sponsor asks is: who already has an audience? Maccabi Tel Aviv had New York, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Paris. Diaspora communities that weren't just fans — they were a revenue stream tied to cultural belonging. Hapoel couldn't replicate that. There's no labor Zionist diaspora handing over commercial sponsorship in Los Angeles.
Lila Soto: Wait — so the Zionist heritage, the Maccabees name, the Star of David — that identity didn't just survive commercialization. It became the commercial product.
Iris Holm: Precisely. The political culture that built the institution became the asset that monetizes it. That's the mechanism nobody names cleanly — privatization didn't create Maccabi's advantage. It revealed it, and then made it financially irreversible.
Lila Soto: And I guess — mm, the compounding just accelerates from there. More revenue funds the youth development system, the youth system replenishes on-field quality, on-field quality attracts the next round of sponsors who want the global audience. Rivals aren't trying to catch a moving target — they're trying to catch a target that moves faster every year.
Iris Holm: Robbie Keane. June 2023.
Lila Soto: Oh — yeah. Maccabi appoints a globally recognized former Premier League and international striker as head coach. Not because the Israeli league suddenly became prestigious. Because the club's institutional credibility made it a serious destination.
Iris Holm: That's the live version of the same loop. Keane doesn't take that job for the league — he takes it for the brand. And the brand exists because 1906 compounded into 1929 compounded into the privatization moment compounded into diaspora revenue. A rival matching Maccabi's current spend doesn't close that. They'd need to match 120 years of accumulated signal.
Lila Soto: Which is — I mean, that's not a gap you close with investment. That's a gap you'd have to somehow inherit. And no one can do that.
Iris Holm: The question isn't whether Hapoel or Beitar can outspend Maccabi. It's whether institutional credibility can be built at all when the reference point already owns the category. And frankly — I don't think it can. Not in football. Not here.
Lila Soto: And that's — yeah, that's the catch-22, isn't it. To close the gap you need the resources. To get the resources you need the credibility. And the credibility is the thing Maccabi Tel Aviv has been accumulating since 1906. You can't buy your way into that loop. You'd have to have started it.
Iris Holm: Which is what makes episodic rival success so misleading. Hapoel wins a season. Beitar runs hot for two years. The structural gap just waits. Youth academies still feeding Maccabi, the diaspora revenue still compounding, the never-relegated signal still doing its work with every sponsor conversation. The field doesn't level — it just pauses.
Lila Soto: Salary caps, academy redistribution — mm, I mean theoretically those are the policy levers. But when the brand is also a cultural identity, when the Star of David on that shirt means something to someone in Paris that has nothing to do with the league table — how do you regulate that? What's the policy instrument for belonging?
Iris Holm: There isn't one. That's the uncomfortable part.
Lila Soto: We started this asking — if a club has never been relegated, what story does your brain tell? Dynasty, you said. Consistent quality. And I think... the honest answer we landed on is almost the opposite. It's not that they were always the best. It's that the structure was designed, over a century, to make falling far enough to matter basically impossible.
Iris Holm: Mm. Dominance that feels inevitable because it was built to feel that way. That's a harder thing to sit with than dynasty.
