With a European title and a 400 million euro squad: the giant hurdle awaiting Hapoel Tel Aviv
The 2024 Europa League winner stands between the Reds and the Conference League league phase. The Bergamo club has become a permanent fixture at the top of Italian football and in European competitions over the last decade, and possesses a squad full of talent — from Charles De Ketelaere to Ederson.
After completing the job against Katowice, Hapoel Tel Aviv can already look towards the next hurdle, and it is much higher. Atalanta, which will meet the Reds in the Conference League playoffs, has turned in recent years from one of the modest teams of Italian football into a very well-known name on the European stage.
The club from Bergamo was founded in 1907, but for most of its history was not among the lions of Italy. Its only major local title is the Italian Cup from 1963, but the big change came in the last decade. Under Gian Piero Gasperini, Atalanta became a top team in Serie A, qualified again and again for Europe, and even reached the Champions League quarterfinals in 2019/20. The peak came in 2024, when it won the first European title in its history with an unforgettable 3:0 win over Bayer Leverkusen in the Europa League final, thanks to a hat-trick by Ademola Lookman. The victory also ended a 51-game unbeaten streak for the Germans.
In the last season, Atalanta continued to be part of the top European landscape. It participated in the Champions League for the fifth time since 2019 and managed to reach the round of 16 — evidence of the status it has built for itself in recent years. The squad waiting for Hapoel includes quite a bit of quality; its value (according to Transfermarket) is measured at no less than 417 million euros (Hapoel's is worth 17 million euros).
One of the prominent names is Charles De Ketelaere, the Belgian attacking player who arrived from Milan and became in Bergamo a much more significant player than the one seen during his time at the San Siro. Gianluca Scamacca, the Italian national team striker, finished 2025/26 as Atalanta's top scorer with 14 goals in all competitions. Beside him is Ederson, the dynamic Brazilian midfielder who has become in recent years one of Atalanta's key players in the center of the field, and almost found himself at Manchester United in the current transfer window.
On paper, Atalanta is of course the clear favorite. But for Hapoel, which only recently returned to the Premier League and has already reached within a pair of games from the central stage in Europe, it is also an opportunity: to compete against one of the prominent teams that Italy has produced in the last decade — and try to surprise on the way to a return to the European stage after 14 years.
