Steven Perez
Dailysports's expert
Hamrun Spartans
Maccabi Haifa
On July 11, Centenary Stadium (Ta’ Qali) will host the first leg of the 1/8 finals of the Champions League Qualification, in which Hamrun Spartans will compete with Maccabi Haifa. The battle will start at 20:00 CET.
Hamrun Spartans
The club has been at the high level in Malta football for a long time. If it won the sixth and so far last FA Trophy back in 1992, then, speaking about the national championship, the team managed to win both in 2021 and 2023, bringing the total number of successes to nine. At the same time, it returned to the European arena. “The Spartans” had started there 8 times before, but could overcome the first opponent, Ballymena United, only in 1984. It finally turned out well to prove the ambitions last summer (a year earlier, the so-called “ban” due to a fixed match back in 2013 prevented the team from participating). The representative of Malta overcame successfully a number of rivals in the Conference League qualification: Alashkert, Mostar and even Levski, and the home battle against Partizan resulted in a 3-3 draw – still, to be honest, it lost with a devastating 1-4 score in Belgrade.
Maccabi Haifa
The team has established its dominance in Israeli football in recent years. “The Greens from the Carmel” took the third league title (and already the fifteenth one in history) in the spring. Moreover, the club is quite active at the international arena. It was possible to break into the group stage of the Champions League for the third time in history in 2022. It turned out to overcome such serious opponents as Olympiacos, Apollon and even Crvena Zvezda. Playing already in the quartet, the team managed to win the battle against Juventus at the home arena – moreover, it scored 2 unanswered goals! Still, the rest of the matches, with the Italian grandee, Benfica and PSG, ended only in the defeats. If the Israeli club tried to fight at first, then there happened a 2-7 failure in the confrontation with the French rival and a 1-6 defeat made by the Portuguese one.
The statistics of head-to-head matches
This will be the first head-to-head match between these clubs.
Predictions
Bookmakers believe that the representative of Israel will decide the destiny of the confrontation, already in Malta. Thus, it is reasonable to bet that the guests from Haifa will win with “a -1 goal handicap” (odd: 1.666).
