Not your average soccer moms

 

Batya Sahar's list of contacts in her mobile phone includes some of the most prominent names in Israeli soccer. With one touch of a button, the mother of Hapoel Tel Aviv's latest acquisition, striker Ben Sahar, can ring up Maccabi Haifa owner Ya'akov Shahar or engage Hapoel owners Moni Harel and Eli Tabib in a frank discussion.

In recent weeks, Batya Sahar has racked up minutes on her phone bill with calls to Harel and Tabib in an effort to extricate her son from La Liga outfit Espanyol and bring him to Bloomfield Stadium. These added up to long hours of intense conversations, whose tone often reached high decibel levels, paving the way for the Hapoel-Espanyol loan deal that was consummated last week.

Sahar often felt exasperated after discussions with Harel and Tabib. "I'm going out of my mind because of this club," she said in reference to Hapoel just days before the deal was concluded. "They think they can sweet-talk everybody. They try to butter me up with nonsense, as if anyone can pull a fast one on me. But I'm no sucker."

Hapoel executives, for their part, took great pains to restrain themselves. After all, their wish to see Ben Sahar wear the red kit trumped any lingering bitterness or tension.

"She's impossible," one Hapoel official said of Batya Sahar in the midst of the discussions with Espanyol. "One can understand the tremendous concern she has for her son, but sometimes this causes damage. We're trying to do things quietly, but with her nothing ever gets done quietly."

Batya Sahar was behind, in front, and in the middle of the scenes throughout the recent tumult. Early last week she flew to Barcelona for a meeting with Espanyol management, carrying on her the agreement with Hapoel Tel Aviv. Her son will suit up for the Premier League champs this season in no small part due to her intervention.

Not the first or last

Sahar is not the first and certainly not the last mother to pull the strings of her son's soccer career. Orit Tamuz, the mother of Beitar Jerusalem striker Toto Tamuz, now finds herself in the middle of the current storm engulfing her son and the club, which is eager to rid itself of the Nigerian-born forward. Before Tamuz and Sahar, there was Aviva Malichi (the mother of retired player Idan Malichi ) and Mira Golasa (Maccabi Haifa midfielder Eyal Golasa's mother ).

Stepping into a male-dominated world, these women feel a sense of obligation to their children, whom they view as vulnerable and in need of protection against potential prey. Though soccer club executives receive them often, they do not always feel comfortable doing so. Simply put, however, they have no choice.

The athletes' mothers invariably warned their interlocutors to stop trying to "trick" them, despite the temptation to do so to a woman who may not understand the sport.

"I admit I don't have much of a clue as to what is going on in soccer," said Orit Tamuz, "and I try not to interfere when it comes to Toto's work on the pitch, but I know better than anyone else what he is worth."

"There were times when club owners would try to cut corners," she said. "They would tell me, 'Forget about it, you have no idea, you don't understand what's going on.' I would always smile back and tell them, 'I might not be a soccer expert, but I'm definitely not stupid.'"

"When Toto played at Hapoel Petah Tikva," she recalled, "I told one of the people there, 'Do you think that the fact that I have breasts makes me a fool?' They tried to sell me a bill of goods and work me over, but I knew not to take the bait. I didn't take an interest in soccer just to look beautiful on the pitch. I'm there to protect my boy."

'I'm no sucker'

It doesn't appear as if soccer executives are eager to do business with the mothers, though this does not appear due, God forbid, to chauvinism. Rather, these officials quickly concluded that it is simply more difficult to deal with them.

"This is an unfair world," said Aviva Malichi. "There's a lot of politics, a lot of under-the-table deals. At first, I felt as if they thought that I didn't understand what was going on and they could deceive me. I needed to show that I was determined, forceful and dominant so they see I don't understand any less than men."

"They tried to convince me that my son is worth less than I thought, that there are better players out there than him," she said. "They tried to lower his value, but then they understood that I'm no sucker."

"It soon turned into an advantage for a woman to handle negotiations with a man," Malichi said. "The conversation turned more civil and polite, and I was treated with respect because I'm a woman. I recommend that more mothers become assertive in soccer."

The greater involvement of mothers in particular, and females in general, on the business side of soccer has been welcomed, despite the initial misgivings.

"Some mothers are more pleasant to deal with than others," said former Beitar Jerusalem chairman Vladimir Shklar. "In the past we dealt with players whose fathers would try to strong-arm us, scream at us and demand that we release their sons unconditionally."

"When dealing with mothers, these things don't happen," he said. "It's possible to speak with them and solve all of the issues in a respectful manner."