Israeli football's broadcasting problem isn't a lack of knowledge, Ynet columnist Guy Leiba argues in a sharp new piece — it's a lack of courage. His column, published this week under the headline "The public wants broadcasters, not publicists," accuses the country's football commentators of having quietly turned into cheerleaders for a product they should be scrutinising.
Leiba's central charge is structural. Broadcasters and pundits, he writes, live inside the same ecosystem as the players, coaches and agents they're supposed to be covering — they socialise with them, get interviewed by them, follow them on social media and are followed back. That closeness, he argues, has quietly replaced critical distance with self-censorship.
Social media fear looms over everything, according to the column. Say a player had a poor game and expect a hundred angry messages; criticise the crowd and a clip gets cut for pile-on outrage on TikTok; call a marquee match boring and risk being accused of "lowering the product." The result, Leiba says, is commentary engineered to avoid backlash rather than to inform.
He takes aim at the reflexive marketing language broadcasters reach for instead — clichés like "it's ours" and "we missed this" deployed to paper over an Israeli top flight that, in his telling, is a comedown after a World Cup summer, the domestic equivalent of trading Disneyland for a mediocre local water park.
Dull, defensive matches get relabelled "tactical" rather than admitted to be simply bad, Leiba writes — broadcasters manufacturing drama that isn't on the pitch rather than saying plainly that a game underwhelmed.
The column holds up the late Meir Einstein, the veteran Israeli broadcaster who died in 2017, as the standard the current generation has abandoned. Einstein, Leiba writes, could call a poor match poor without flinching, and was willing to challenge misbehaving crowds or officials directly rather than smoothing it over for the audience.
On stadium violence, Leiba is blunt: every time a flare lands on the pitch, he writes, "the usual ritual begins" — expressions of regret from the broadcast booth, but no real pursuit of who is responsible or what should change. Sympathy substitutes for scrutiny.
His closing argument is a plea for respect rather than reassurance: broadcasters, he writes, can "stop fearing the viewer and simply respect them with the truth" instead of manufacturing enthusiasm for a league that, on plenty of nights, does not deserve it.
The piece lands as one of the more pointed pieces of media self-criticism published in Israeli sport this year, aimed less at any single commentator than at a broadcasting culture Leiba says has confused proximity to the game with loyalty to it.
