Six decades of sport, from a game to commodity: football as a parable

As in most other states in the world, football was and still is the most popular sport in Israel. This essay portrays the development of football as a parable of other sports in Israel. It is suggested that football's history is epitomized by the process in which a game was transferred into commodity: football in Israel in the first decades after statehood was controlled by politics. In the 1980s and onward football became increasingly commercial. In fact, the story of football reflects in general the story of Israeli society. Other sports followed suit, however to a lesser extent. In the 1950s sports were supported and maintained by political organizations. In the 1990s they became dependent – some more than others – on capital, that is, the commercial market. At the threshold of the twenty-first century Israeli football seemed quite ready to join the mainstream of world football: to become a commodity in a competitive market.