Three Israeli soccer teams in European qualifying action and three totally different results is what we got on Thursday night. Let’s go from the best to the worst shall we?

Hapoel Tel Aviv took care of Katowice 2-0 in first leg, third round UEFA Conference League qualifying in a game that they dominated from top to bottom as the Reds were by far the better team on the Miskolc pitch on this night. Scoring a pair of goals early on in the game set the tone, one coming from budding superstar Stan Turiel and the other via Roie Alkukin with a magnificent chip was all that Head Coach Elyaniv Barda needed to head to the second leg in Poland with a nice lead.

However, a nice lead should have been a terrific lead as only slurring two goals will hopefully not be costly to Hapoel next Wednesday night. The Reds should have and could have filled the bet with there, four or even five goals, but missed opportunities, especially an easy as pie one that Daniel Dappa flubbed up would have really helped out the team in leg number two.

The result in Hungary which serves as Hapoel’s home away from home was a good one, don’t get me wrong, but boy, a larger first leg victory would have put away Katowice well before the return leg. But let;’s let bygones be bygones and say that, hey, Hapoel has so far shown the continent that the former European powerhouse is back after well over a decade that saw the team have to crawl out of the second division not once, but twice.

That’s a huge accomplishment for a Reds team that is guided by one of their former stars in Barda who was jettisoned out of Hapoel Beer Sheva, another team where he had been one of their most crucial players in helping take the capital of south to the top of the Premier League. He began his career with Beer Sheva, then played for both Maccabi Haifa and Hapoel Tel Aviv before embarking on an incredible six seasons at Genk before coming back home and winning a 3 championships in a row back in the southern capital.

Talk about absolutely amazing and that’s Elyaniv Barda and now what he’s doing with Hapoel Tel Aviv is no less phenomenal as the 44-year old guides the Reds through Europe.

Shifting over to Beitar Jerusalem where Almog Cohen disposed of AEK Larnaca last week, the yellow-and-black came up a bit short against Austria Wein in a 2-1 defeat in first leg third round UEFA Conference League qualifying in Ploesti, Romania. A one-goal loss is not the end of the world especially in a game that could have finished much, much worse than just 2-1, so that’s definitely good news for Beitar as they head to Vienna for the second leg.

But Beitar could have gotten a lot more out of a first half that saw an active Noam Muche give them a 1-0 lead early on. Something just didn’t click for Cohen’s squad up front as both Omer Atzily and Yarden Shua weren’t the lethal threat that they had been last season. In fact, both were subbed off the middle of the second half which is something that was a head scratcher.

With a 1-0 lead, the most important thing that needed to happen for Beitar was to go into the break with the advantage, but perhaps a bit naive on the European front with not much experience from top to bottom, they conceded just ahead of halftime which is always a killer for any team. The last thing you want to do is give up a goal at that moment in time and that’s exactly what Cohen’s charges did.

To make matters worse the goal had Gil Cohen’s name all over it with an awful clearance. The defender fell out of favor with former Head Coach Barak Itzhaki as Cohen barely dressed down the stretch and wasn’t even part of the squad with even Ori Dahan preferred over him. Perhaps Almog Cohen now knows why that was the case.

Of course, the reason he was even paying was because Luka Gadrani, the club’s star central defender had been out injured and made his 2026-27 debut in the second half when Gil Cohen came limping off. Gadrani turned a hobby Beitar defense last season into one that was the most difficult to deal with for any team that would play the yellow-and-black. Together with Brayan Carabali, the duo created problems for anyone and everyone and prevented balls aplenty from finding the back of Miguel Silva’s goal.

With Gadrani fit among with Tomer Yosefi who joined the club in the offseason, Beitar does have a legitimate chance of overturning the 2-1 deficit in the second leg. It will not be easy, that is for sure, but they still have a real chance to do something special and make their way to the playoff round of the competition.

One team that may also be in the playoff round of the Conference League is Maccabi Tel Aviv after they laid the proverbial egg with a 3-0 “home” loss to CSKA Sofia in first leg third round UEFA Europa League play. Over in Batumi, Georgia, Kenny Miller’s team went through a 90 minute nightmare which saw nothing go their way form beginning to end. It was no doubt their worst performance under Miller since he took over the helm this past May as it was if Maccabi didn’t show up in any way, shape or form.

Maccabi have not made the moves with their squad that the fans had expected and moves that they really needed to make thus far and that came back to bite them in the rear. There is still some major upheaval that needs to take place with the roster that is currently in place starting from Roy Revivo, who didn’t make the trip as a reported deal with Elche in La Liga on tap for the left back.

That in itself probably created some of the chaos that Miller and his team didn’t need. There is also Helio Varela who has been rumored to be on the market following his performance at the World Cup with Cape Verde along with the fact that improvements need to be made on the defensive and midfield end.

Ali Camara and Issouf Sissokho were both shaky on the pitch which was something that plagued Maccabi last season while the youngsters that took part in the game including Shahar Rosen who needed to be subbed off at halftime. There is also the future of Andrade which is as cloudy as ever plus the over reliance on captain Dor Peretz who can’t do it all every single game.

Maccabi is clearly still under construction and yes, the World Cup did slow down summer signings, but it’s clear than Steven Vanharen still has plenty of work to do in order to get the yellow-and-blue back up to speed and to the level of being able to compete for the league championship.

The biggest question now is, can Maccabi qualify for Europe? It probably won’t be in the Europa League which is not the end of the world as they would probably be overmatched there as they had been in the recent past, but will it even be the Conference League? If Maccabi plays the way they did in this match, they will only be playing domestically this coming season and the would be really too bad.