About 5Gold

5Gold

5Gold, also styled 5GOLD and known in fuller form as Sport 5 Gold, is an Israeli pay television sports channel operated by the Sports Channel company, the broadcaster known as Sport 5 and owned by the RGE Group. Launched in March 2007 alongside its twin 5Live, 5Gold was given the opposite assignment to its sibling: while 5Live was built for live sport as it happens, 5Gold was created to specialise in repeats of classic sporting action and archive events. It is one of the six channels long operated by the Tel Aviv-based Sports Channel company and one of the five RGE sports channels named in the carriage agreements through which Israeli platform operators offer the Sport 5 bouquet. Its history is a study in how a modern sports network uses its own past — the great matches, tournaments and moments it has accumulated — as a programme service in its own right, and, unexpectedly, how even an archive channel can be pulled back into live duty when a major rights deal demands every available feed.

Origins in the Sports Channel expansion

5Gold belongs to the second generation of Sport 5 spin-offs. The parent Sports Channel first aired in 1990, taking its name from its position on channel 5, and over the following decade became the established home of televised sport in Israel, credited in studies of Israeli sports media with raising the standard of domestic basketball coverage and giving sustained exposure to sports that the generalist channels neglected. In 2001 the company created 5Plus, its first subscription subsidiary, and learned that viewers would pay for additional sports capacity, even as critics complained that valued content was leaving the main channel. By 2007 the network faced two pressures at once: a growing portfolio of live rights that produced constant scheduling clashes, and a growing archive of memorable sport with no dedicated outlet. The paired launch of March 2007 addressed both pressures simultaneously, splitting them between two new channels with complementary identities.

Launch in March 2007 alongside 5Live

The Sports Channel launched 5Gold in March 2007, together with 5Live, in a single expansion of the family. Contemporary summaries of the network describe the division of labour in one sentence: 5Live was for live sport, and 5Gold was for repeats of classic sports action. The pairing was the third and fourth programme services in a family that had begun with one channel in 1990 and added only one spin-off in its first seventeen years, a measure of how quickly the economics of sports television were changing. Later in the same year, on 23 December 2007, the company added a high-definition channel carrying the UEFA Champions League, the NBA playoffs and Wimbledon, showing that 2007 was a year of expansion on every front. For 5Gold, however, the defining decision was editorial rather than technical: the network judged that sporting nostalgia — the chance to watch celebrated matches and events again in full — was valuable enough to sustain a channel of its own.

An archive channel for classic sport

The remit of 5Gold sets it apart from every other member of the Sport 5 family. Descriptions of the network define the channel by repeats of classic sporting action and archive events, and that mission shapes a schedule built from the recorded heritage of the sports the group covers: famous football matches, historic basketball games, and the tournaments and finals that have accumulated in the Sports Channel's library since 1990 and through its rights partnerships. Archive programming serves several purposes for a sports network. It fills hours that live sport cannot, since even the largest rights portfolio leaves long stretches of the day without a live event. It keeps celebrated competitions visible between their annual editions, sustaining audience attachment to properties such as European football and the NBA. And it gives long-serving subscribers a form of value that a highlights package cannot reproduce, namely the full match experienced again at its original length and rhythm. In the typology of the Sport 5 bouquet, if 5Live is the channel of the present moment, 5Gold is the channel of the remembered one.

The unexpected live role in the Champions League deal

The most surprising chapter in 5Gold's history is that the archive channel was formally written into a major live rights agreement. When the Sports Channel acquired exclusive live rights to the UEFA Champions League for Israel for the three seasons from 2012-13 to 2014-15, trade reporting of the deal stated that the broadcaster would show three live matches on each match night across its bouquet of channels, naming Sport 5, Sport 5+ and 5Gold, with a weekly highlights show on the main Sport 5 channel and mobile and internet rights included in the agreement, which was brokered by TEAM Marketing, UEFA's sales agent for the competition. International listings from the period corroborate the arrangement in practice, showing 5Gold as the Israeli carrier for individual Champions League fixtures. The episode demonstrates a practical truth of multichannel broadcasting: on the biggest European nights, when eight matches may kick off simultaneously, a network uses every feed it owns, and the distinction between an archive channel and a live channel becomes secondary to the need for capacity. 5Gold's presence in the deal also confirms that the channel was regarded by its owner as a full member of the bouquet rather than a minor extra.

Criticism of the 2007 expansion

Like its twin, 5Gold was born into controversy. Accounts of the March 2007 launches record that the new channels were met with great criticism from viewers, who complained about the further loss of content from the established Sport 5 services in favour of additional pay channels. The argument had been building since 5Plus appeared in 2001 and was aired prominently in Israeli press commentary of the period, including a Haaretz critique of multichannel sports television in January 2007 that attacked the fragmentation of coverage. For an archive channel the criticism carried a particular edge: viewers who had originally watched classic matches as part of the main channel's schedule could see repeats and heritage programming, too, being gathered into a subscription service. The broadcaster's counter-argument was implicit in the structure of the bouquet — rights costs were rising, a single channel could neither show everything live nor honour the archive, and specialised channels were the industry's standard response. The debate that greeted 5Gold's launch remains the standard reference point in Israel for the wider argument about how much sport should sit behind paywalls.

Distribution and platform carriage

5Gold has been distributed throughout its life as part of the Sport 5 package on Israel's principal television platforms, the HOT cable network and the yes satellite service, through which the Sports Channel's services have long been available. Its status was documented afresh when internet-delivered operators reshaped the market in the 2010s. A May 2017 announcement by Partner Communications of a long-term agreement with RGE listed the five sports channels its Partner TV customers would be offered as Sport 5, 5 Plus, 5 Live, 5 Gold and 5 HD, placing 5Gold squarely inside the standard bouquet rather than outside it. Reporting on the rival Cellcom TV service in the same period described the market's tiering: after an introductory phase, Cellcom included only Sport 5 and 5 Plus in its general package, with the premium Sport 5 channels costing an additional monthly sum reported as 52 shekels, in line with the pricing of yes and HOT. 5Gold thus occupied the premium layer of the family, an addition for committed subscribers rather than part of the entry-level offer, while remaining a named component of the complete Sport 5 line-up that operators marketed to sports viewers.

Ownership within the RGE Group

5Gold is owned through the Sports Channel by the RGE Group, and its launch coincided almost exactly with the completion of the corporate consolidation that created the modern group. RGE began as Aviv Giladi Holdings, also known as United Media Group, established on 10 March 1999, when Aviv Giladi held a 25 per cent stake in JCS Sports, then the operator of the Sports Channel, as well as interests in other Israeli media companies. United Media Group bought Noga Communications in November 2000, acquired a majority share in JCS Sports on 22 March 2004 and became its sole shareholder on 29 November 2006; in September 2006 it renamed itself RGE, for Recanati Giladi Entertainment. 5Gold therefore appeared in March 2007 among the first launches of the fully consolidated RGE. Len Blavatnik's Access Industries bought 20 per cent of the group in June 2008 and increased its stake to 33 per cent in 2010, and RGE is today controlled by the Recanati family through the Naftali Group, with Keshet Media Group holding a 25 per cent minority interest. The group operates from a complex in western Herzliya and also runs the Children's Channel, the Logi channel and the Knesset Channel franchise, placing 5Gold within one of Israel's principal television groups.

HD feeds and the modern Sport 5 line-up

5Gold spent its first decade as a standard-definition service, but it was carried along by the network's successive technical upgrades. The group's HD journey began in December 2007 with a dedicated channel for Champions League football, NBA playoff games and Wimbledon, later extended to the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games and Formula One and made available to both yes HD and HOT HD customers; a 3D channel was tried in April 2011 and closed within months for lack of demand. The comprehensive change came on 8 October 2018, when the Sports Channel launched 5Stars as part of a major overhaul of the network. 5Stars began life as a high-definition channel, and its launch was followed by HD feeds being provided for all of the network's sister channels, a step that brought the 2007-vintage services, 5Gold among them, up to the picture standard of the newer outlets. A 4K channel and a temporary UEFA Euro 2024 channel have since been added to the family's history, yet the core bouquet in which 5Gold sits — the main channel, 5Plus, 5Live and 5Gold — has remained recognisable through every reorganisation, which is itself evidence of how durable the 2007 structure proved to be.

Sporting memory and the value of the archive

Beyond its schedule, 5Gold raises a question that has become central to sports media: who keeps the past of televised sport, and in what form? The Sports Channel has been broadcasting Israeli and international sport since 1990, and its archive contains the domestic basketball and football eras it helped to popularise, the European campaigns of Israeli clubs, and decades of the world's leading competitions shown to Israeli audiences. A dedicated archive channel turns that accumulation into a living service rather than a warehouse, returning classic action to the screen in complete form. In a market where Sport 5 competes with Charlton's Sport 1 to Sport 4 channels and other sports services for the live rights that dominate attention, the archive is the one asset a rival cannot outbid, because it consists of broadcasts the group already holds. 5Gold also feeds the wider Sport 5 ecosystem centred on Sport5.co.il, the group's sports news site, where historic matches and moments are a staple of features and anniversary coverage. The channel's endurance suggests that, for a significant part of the audience, sport is not only what happens next but also what is worth watching again.

Legacy and significance

5Gold's legacy is twofold. Within the Sport 5 network, it completed, alongside 5Live, the family's transformation into a differentiated bouquet in March 2007, proving that a spin-off channel could be built entirely from archive and repeat programming rather than from fresh rights purchases. Its formal inclusion in the 2012-13 to 2014-15 Champions League agreement, and its appearance in listings as a live carrier for European fixtures, showed that even the network's nostalgia channel formed part of its live capacity when the biggest competitions demanded it. In the wider history of Israeli television, 5Gold marks the moment sports broadcasting began to treat its own recorded past as a channel-worthy product — an idea that streaming-era on-demand libraries have since made universal. Launched amid criticism that Sport 5 was asking viewers to pay for ever more channels, it has outlasted the controversy, surviving the HD transition and the 2018 overhaul of the network to remain part of the bouquet that Israeli operators offer sports subscribers today.