Barak Bachar and Lior Refaelov say Maccabi Haifa has learned from last season and rebuilt its squad, staff and training structure for the new campaign.
Maccabi Haifa had a rough season last year as they finished in fifth place in league play and missed out on competing in European qualifiers. Along with the disappointing results, the supporters were unhappy, to say the least, with how the campaign had been managed from top to bottom.
The Greens have already endured an 0-2 start to the new 2026/27 season, losing their first two Toto Cup games, 3-2 in the Haifa derby and then 3-0 to Kiryat Shmona. However, despite the losses, Haifa believes it has plenty to build on after holding its season-opening press conference at the Kfar Galim Training Center. Head coach Barak Bachar and sports director Lior Refaelov spoke about how they view the upcoming campaign after experiencing a season well below the club's lofty standards.
"It's great to begin anew," Bachar began. "We had a couple of very tough seasons, and we needed to learn from what went wrong. We also had to make some serious changes, both at our training center in Kfar Galim and with our staff. We know that we will be judged by our results. We wanted to bring in players with a specific profile for the club, and we feel that we found the right players, but of course we will only know for sure once we are on the pitch."
"There are times when you need to know how to make changes, and that's what we did. We brought in some new coaches who can raise the standards of our training sessions, and being able to work with Lior Refaelov off the pitch now after he played under me a number of years ago means we can really help build this club back up. We both know what it means to be a part of Maccabi Haifa, and we will do our best to create the right system and procedures. We put all of our failures on the table after last season, and we knew what we needed to do together to begin making the necessary changes."

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