Women's Football in Israel

The Israel Football Association administers official women's competitions. In February 2023, it reported 2,679 registered female players across three adult leagues, two girls' leagues, two under-15 leagues, five children's leagues, and three introductory leagues.[5] A 2019 investigation described the top flight as professional and subject to budgetary controls, while noting that clubs did not uniformly meet the required professional-staff standards.[8]

The women's Premier League consists of eight clubs. The 2026/27 season opened on September 10, 2026, with four simultaneous matches broadcast live on 5PLUS, featuring Hapoel Katamon Jerusalem, Maccabi Holon, Hapoel Ra'anana, M.S. Kiryat Gat, Hapoel Tel Aviv, Maccabi ASA Tel Aviv, Maccabi Kishronot Hadera, and Bnot Netanya.[9] Hapoel Katamon Jerusalem stood first after three matches, having won the 2025/26 championship, the first senior title in the club's history. Kiryat Gat, the 2025/26 runner-up, had previously claimed five consecutive championships and three consecutive cup titles.[9][10]

In 2025, Maccabi Tel Aviv re-entered women's football through a Football Association-approved merger with ASA Tel Aviv. The merged entity, Maccabi ASA Tel Aviv, joined the Premier League and trains at Maccabi's Kiryat Shalom complex; it also operates an additional senior team in Liga Artzit alongside seven youth, girls', and introductory squads. ASA Tel Aviv brought a record of eight Israeli women's championships and five state cups, while Maccabi's original women's team had operated from 1998 to 2002.[7]

A 2015 report cited UEFA figures of 515 registered senior female players and 803 girls playing football.[11] A 2019 investigation estimated 1,630 women among roughly 40,000 football participants nationwide and said the country's overall participation level was about one-fifth that of similarly sized European countries.[8] These figures use different years and definitions and therefore should not be treated as directly comparable, but they document the expansion of organized competitions and participation.

Women have participated in Israeli sport since the Yishuv period, both as team members and as individual athletes and coaches, although the growth of women's competitive sport in Israel was slower and achieved more modest results than the worldwide development of women's athletics.[2]

Organized football began in Israel in the 1920s, while JNS dates the beginnings of Israeli women's football to 1970. The women's national team was formed in 1997, and the organized league system took shape in the 1998/99 period.[2][3] Its structure resembled what players and officials later called an "upside-down pyramid": the national team and senior league were created before a firm youth-development system had been established beneath them.[3]

This later development occurred within a wider sporting culture that the Jewish Women's Archive describes as historically masculine, even as women's participation increased and political efforts sought greater equality in athletics.[2] Limited youth pathways reinforced the problem, leaving many girls to play with boys or stop competing as they grew older.[3]

In the league's early years, matches were sometimes played before senior men's games, major clubs including Maccabi Haifa, Beitar Jerusalem, Hapoel Tel Aviv, and Maccabi Tel Aviv invested in women's teams, and some matches received television coverage.[12] As those clubs progressively reduced or ended their support, however, the league's playing standard, media visibility, and public following declined.[12]

Hapoel Bnot Katamon Jerusalem, the women's team of Hapoel Jerusalem, offers one of the clearest illustrations of how women's football has developed at the club level. Founded in 2020, the team entered the lowest-ranked Arzit League ahead of the 2020/21 season, finished second in its first campaign, and was promoted to the Leumit League.[6] A second-place finish in 2021/22 earned promotion again, and the 2022/23 season marked the first time Jerusalem had a club competing in the eight-team women's Premier League.[6]

Hapoel Jerusalem had been working on women's and girls' football since 2011, beginning with neighborhood leagues and then expanding to teams for young girls and amateur women's leagues across the city. Club CEO Uri Sheradsky said that before these activities, girls and women in Jerusalem had no option to play organized football.[6]

At the time of reporting, the squad ranged from ages 16 to 40 and included Christian, Muslim, and Jewish players, as well as secular and religious athletes. One Haredi player competed in a specially designed skirt approved by the Israel Football Association. The squad also included foreign players from Ghana, Brazil, and Nigeria.[6]

The financial realities were stark: the women's team cost approximately NIS 1.7 million annually, compared with about NIS 15 million for the men's team, and carried a deficit of roughly NIS 500,000. Average player pay was around NIS 5,400 per month, approximately minimum wage. Except for foreign players, most squad members studied, worked, or attended high school because Premier League wages alone were insufficient to live on.[6] Matches were free to attend and drew approximately 50–100 spectators; the report said no women's Premier League match had been broadcast live on television until 2021, when the Sports Channel agreed to air approximately one game per week.[6]

Building a sustainable youth pipeline has been recognized as central to the sport's future. As of 2012, organized youth structures were still being rebuilt: a girls' league for ages 11–13 had been established roughly five years earlier, a league for ages 14–15 began in the 2010/11 season, and a "Gold Squad" operated for girls aged 11–14. These programs received support from Athena, the Council for the Advancement of Women in Sport.[12]

After UEFA selected Israel to host the Women's Under-19 Championship, the Israel Football Association established a dedicated academy for players aged 14–18, designed to supply the under-17 and under-19 national teams. Academy players trained in nine weekly sessions, compared with the one or two sessions commonly available in standard club environments. Its annual budget was reported at NIS 1.5 million, funded by the Football Association with additional support from Athena, UEFA's Women's Football Development Programme, and the Ministry of Sport. The academy aimed to produce 20–25 high-quality players, though the report cautioned that an academy alone could not compensate for the country's relatively small base of girls playing football.[11]

By 2015, Israel operated six leagues compared with two in 2009 and had added a league for girls aged ten and under.[11] A grassroots project called Bo'otot – A League of Their Own extended opportunities further, bringing girls' football to youth villages throughout Israel through cooperation among the Ministry of Culture and Sport, the Equal Opportunities Association Sha'ar Shivyon, the Football Association, and the Ministry of Education's boarding-school administration. The project added more than 120 players to the Football Association's competitive frameworks.[13]

Karin Sendel, Israel's record-holder for women's national-team appearances with 70 caps, made her debut in 2005 and recalled that when she began playing there was nowhere for a teenage girl to compete; girls often had to join boys' teams because organized women's football was unavailable.[3] The next generation included Talia Sommer, who plays for Butler University in the United States and scored three goals in four matches during the national team's promotion campaign. Sommer said that for the first six years of her career she was the only girl in her league and on her Maccabi Tel Aviv team, before helping ASA Tel Aviv win the league and cup at age 14.[3]

The Israeli women's national team has been playing since 1997.[14] Israel has never qualified for a major international women's football tournament, including the FIFA Women's World Cup.[14] A 2012 report placed the national team 65th in the world at that time.[12]

The team's international competitive position improved with promotion from UEFA Nations League C to League B, secured by a 3–1 victory over Estonia on May 30, 2025. The goals were scored by Noa Slimhojits, Smadar Cohen, and Maayan Ben Yisrael.[3] Team manager Nisso Avitan acknowledged that League B would represent a major step up. Israel had earned only one point from 18 possible in qualifying for the 2025 Women's European Championship, but Avitan and others within the squad believed the team had improved considerably since that campaign.[3]

In January 2026, the team's stated next major challenge was qualifying for the 2027 Women's World Cup in Brazil, with Belgium, Luxembourg, and Scotland identified as qualifying opponents. Most players represented Israeli clubs, while some competed in Germany, the United States, and Belgium.[14]

An ongoing operational difficulty has been the requirement to play matches abroad because many foreign national teams have declined to travel to Israel during the war. Avitan said this deprived players of the preparation benefits of genuine home matches and affected supporters as well as the squad.[3]

Research on women's place in Israeli football has extended beyond participation to spectatorship. A study published in Soccer and Society (vol. 10, no. 6, 2009, pp. 883–896) by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev examined Israeli women who attended football matches and argued that their increasing presence challenged the game's male hegemony.[15] It described the women as independent and committed fans while finding that their relationship to football was mediated by gender and that their autonomy in the stadium was relative rather than absolute.[15]

The study concluded that football in Israel was no longer exclusively a men's domain: although women's space and autonomy in stadiums remained relative, the football ground provided an arena in which women could assert identity and commitment.[15]

Women's football in Israel occupies a distinctive position: part of a global sport played by women in 177 countries, yet historically required to establish its legitimacy largely outside the mainstream of national sporting culture.[1] Its history reflects broader tensions between women's growing participation in public life and the persistence of gendered sporting institutions. The status of women in Israeli sport has been described as reflecting women's status in Israeli society more broadly, with political efforts seeking greater equality in athletics even as progress has been uneven.[2]

Available participation snapshots suggest a larger organized base, although their definitions differ. A 2015 report cited 515 registered senior players and 803 girls, while the Football Association reported 2,679 registered female players across all age groups in February 2023.[11][5] Maccabi Tel Aviv has returned to the women's game, and all four matches in the opening round of the 2026/27 Premier League season were televised.[9][7] The national team has also secured promotion to UEFA Nations League B.[3]

The catalog description of Amir Ben-Porat's 2015 Hebrew-language study emphasized that players continued taking the field every week despite the sport's marginal status, framing their persistence as an assertion that women's football existed and deserved recognition.[1] Since then, the expansion of official competitions and the return of major clubs have given that assertion greater institutional backing, even though full parity remains a work in progress.[5][7]

Structural resource inequality has been a persistent feature of Israeli women's football. Data presented in a Knesset Research and Information Center report showed that women represented 21.6% of Israel's active athletes aged seven and above in 2021, yet made up only 4.1% of all soccer players.[4] The report also documented that 95% of female athletes trained on half-sized fields, approximately 60% of fields used by women lacked locker rooms, and around 75% lacked equipment-storage space.[4]

A 2019 investigation found that infrastructure problems extended to dressing rooms built for only eight players, visiting teams sometimes changing outdoors, and women's squads routinely receiving late training slots or poorly lit fields after boys' and men's teams had used them.[8] Average club budgets were estimated at approximately NIS 700,000, potentially approaching NIS 1 million, with a reported NIS 3 million in Football Association investment and a NIS 4.4 million national-team budget.[8]

A September 2026 report calculated the average gross monthly salary in the women's Premier League at NIS 2,000, compared with NIS 45,000 in the men's Premier League and NIS 8,000 in the men's second division.[16] The report cautioned that the calculation method was unclear and that young squad members and players' additional employment affected the average. Many women's-league players consequently work, study, or attend school alongside football.[16] Former national-team manager Gabi Burstein has called for investment in youth development, identifiable role models, and a five- to ten-year strategic plan.[3]

The Culture and Sports Ministry reported using a 30% female-representation threshold for sports-association management and, in 2023, planned a 10% reduction in support for organizations that failed to meet the requirement. It also reported doubling the budgets of sports leagues and individual sports through Athena, the Center for the Promotion of Women's Sports.[4] A Football Association reform proposal sought an independent women's-football sector with its own professional or technical director, women's coaching courses, a dedicated refereeing pool, school leagues, expanded broadcasting, professional branding for the top league, and a graduated requirement for men's clubs to establish women's or girls' teams.[5]