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Netanya owner has taken team far, but has few friends to show for it By Moshe Harush In two years, Maccabi Netanya's owner revived the club's fortunes, recalling its glory days of the 1980s. But along the way, German-Jewish businessman Daniel Jammer has left a number of associates feeling angered, embittered or emotionally scarred by his controversial management style. These disgruntled figures stretch from the club's former owners to the coaches to the front office and personal acquaintances, who are speaking up about their experiences with Jammer. They describe him as a micromanager, a solo flyer, hot-tempered, short-fused and endlessly suspicious, a man who absolutely hates it when people disagree with him. Advertisement "He is not the most pleasant gentleman, to say the least," says former owner Asher Alon. "It's no fun sitting with him. He's convinced he knows everything." Jammer's attorney and friend from Germany, Numa Manuel, admits Jammer is a tough person. "But," he insists, "he has to be like that because in business you can't succeed if you're not obstinate." Jammer got to Netanya through Henry Meingarten, an Israeli of German origin, who served as chairman of Maccabi Germany, where Jammer had played as a boy. Jammer was already addicted to soccer by then, having bought Slovak soccer club FC Senec. He surprised Meingarten by telling him he wanted to immigrate to Israel and asked Meingarten to find him a club in Israel to buy. Meingarten hooked up with business partner Shaya Porath when Netanya came up on the selling block. After five months of negotiations, during which Meingarten says he developed a close relationship with Jammer, the latter informed Meingarten and Porath that he was taking over the reins. He agreed to pay them a fee for professional services. Meingarten and Porath say he never paid them the third installment of the fee on the claim they had already received enough. Gil Lev, Jammer's attorney, counters that the deal the two presented his client was simplistic and did not account for the complicated reality of the situation. "Although the actual deal didn't resemble the deal Porath and Meingarten presented, they were paid the full professional fee agreed on between Jammer and Meingarten," Lev said. In the summer of 2006, Eyal Berkovic - whom Jammer made general manager - agreed to pay team doctor Michal Goldwirth NIS 15,000 a month, a big raise from her NIS 3,000-a-month salary the previous season. Before the deal was even written up the manager, with the backing of the boss, informed her that the deal was off. The club issued an official statement that there was a "lack of chemistry between the manager and Michal." Many people at the club thought the statement was strange. Goldwirth challenged the cancellation and won her annual salary last year in arbitration. "This story," says Goldwirth, "left me deeply scarred," but she won't comment further. Berkovic, for his part, eventually got fed up and left. Since taking over the franchise two years ago, Jammer has shown an interest in keeping track of every detail about the club, according to Netanya associates, but he has struggled to learn Hebrew. So he asked Itzik Genish, the club's press officer, to translate everything related to the club. Genish, who took to Jammer during the negotiations phase, took on the Sisyphean task of translating all the written and electronic media in Israel. Club officials say Genish got yelled at when there were gaps between his media reports and what actually transpired, and refer to him as Jammer's punching bag. However, Genish did not seem to mind, at least on the outside, and earned the reputation as Jammer's right-hand man. Last season, Genish was promoted to head the club's youth division. Some of Jammer's close relations have gone sour. Arik Izikovich, a board member of Beitar Nes Tubruk, a youth soccer club based in Netanya, says he was socially close to Jammer for months. The friendship between the two - and cooperation between their clubs - came to sudden halt over a year ago, allegedly because Netanya recruited Tubruk's Hen Ezra without his club's approval. Netanya's Amir Shelach would later pay the price for the end of the relationship. According to him, he was asked by national team manager Shlomo Scharf, Tubruk's founder, to help run a summer camp. Shelach says Scharf told him the camp had nothing to do with Tubruk, but Jammer fired him after flyers came out advertising the camp with his picture and a reference to Tubruk. "He claimed I wasn't being loyal to the club, and that there was a conflict of interest." Jammer sees it differently. According to him, Izikovich and Scharf only invited him to dinner once, and he soon came to see the clubs had different interests. "While Maccabi Netanya is a nonprofit club that promotes young athletes, Beitar Tubruk profits off the ownership rights to minors," Jammer said. Others attesting to Jammer's temper include city officials. More than once he threatened to move his team's practices and games to another venue over the issue of building a new stadium, according to officials who asked not to be identified. If Jammer were to move the team unilaterally, he would be contractually obligated to pay the former owners NIS 8 million. That sum has apparently kept him from following through on his threat. Jammer admits he has expressed his frustration about the slow pace of building the new stadium, "but I do that in front of the mayor, whom I admire, and in a very polite manner. I wish to stress the conditions under which we work, without training facilities in Netanya and without a stadium, are not even known in the third world, making our accomplishments even more impressive." 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