About Sport 2 (Israel)

Sport 2 (Israel)

Sport 2 is a Hebrew-language pay television sports channel in Israel, operated by Charlton Ltd of Tel Aviv. It is the second channel of the Charlton family — Sport 1, Sport 2, Sport 3 and Sport 4, joined in 2026 by Sport 6 — and it sits at channel 52 on HOT, yes, Cellcom TV and Partner TV, immediately beside Sport 1 at channel 51. Sport 2 was launched in 2007, together with Sport 1, when the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting first allowed Charlton to operate permanent subscription channels instead of selling its football match by match on pay-per-view. Since then it has been one of the twin pillars of the most valuable sports rights portfolio in Israeli television, carrying live Israeli Premier League football, the English Premier League, European competition and a wide range of other sports in Hebrew, in high definition since 2015. To understand Sport 2 is to understand how Israeli football moved, over two decades, from free channels into a paid, multi-channel world.

Charlton, the operator behind the channel

Sport 2's operator, Charlton, is a commercial broadcasting company owned by Eli Azur and Pini Zahavi and based in Tel Aviv. Azur is a media proprietor whose holdings came to include the Maariv newspaper; Zahavi is internationally known as one of football's most influential player agents. The company, also branded on air simply as Sport 1 after its flagship channel, describes its business as broadcasting sporting events from Israel and around the world across its channels. Charlton's chief executive Adar Zahavi fronted the company publicly in its international rights announcements, including the 2021 deal that brought the electric off-road racing series Extreme E to all four Charlton channels and its digital platform, sport.co.il. The company is regulated, like all Israeli cable and satellite channels, by the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting, whose approvals created Sport 2 in 2007, governed its move into high definition, and a decade later shaped the launch of its younger siblings, Sport 3 and Sport 4.

Before Sport 2 existed: Charlton's pay-per-view years

Charlton's Israeli broadcasting history reaches back to the late 1990s, when it showed English and Italian league football and was the first to broadcast Israel's second division regularly, renting airtime on the Middle East channel because it owned no channel of its own. A combined broadcast of Maccabi Haifa against Paris Saint-Germain and Beitar Jerusalem against Glasgow Rangers on 1 October 1998 drew a reported 29 percent rating, but the arrangement provoked legal and regulatory challenges, and in January 1999 the cable council ruled that such broadcasts required its permission. In the early 2000s Charlton, still channel-less, could not exploit rights it owned; the Italian league went unseen in Israel for a period before its rights were bought from Charlton by the rival Sports Channel. The turning point came at the end of 2003, when Charlton won the tender for Israeli Premier League rights and launched digital pay-per-view channels named Shabbat Shel Kaduregel, "Football Saturday," and then a parallel English football channel. Israeli viewers, used to free football, objected loudly to paying — the grievance that would follow Charlton, and define Sport 2's eventual bargain with the public, for years.

2007: Sport 1 and Sport 2 are born

After repeated applications, in 2007 the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting approved something different: two permanent pay channels, at a lower total cost to viewers than ordering matches week by week. They were named Sport 1 and Sport 2. The change of model mattered as much as the new channel itself. Under pay-per-view Charlton could show essentially only the Israeli and English leagues it had been authorised for; as permanent channels, Sport 1 and Sport 2 could build full schedules. Charlton quickly added competitions never before shown regularly in Israel — the Copa Libertadores, Belgian league football and even horse racing — and resumed showing Italian league football after a four-year absence, in a shared arrangement with the Sports Channel. From the start of the 2008/09 season the two channels also carried UEFA Champions League matches under an agreement with the Sports Channel, an arrangement that lasted until 2018. Sport 2's identity was thus fixed early: not a spill-over feed but a full second channel, programmed in parallel with Sport 1 so that two live matches could run at once.

The second channel's role in the pair

In practice, Sport 1 and Sport 2 operate as a matched pair. Charlton's rights portfolio has always contained more simultaneous football than one channel can show: Israeli Premier League fixtures cluster on Saturdays, English Premier League matches kick off together on Saturday afternoons, and European midweeks stack matches into identical slots. Sport 2 exists so that the second match in each of those stacks has a permanent home. UEFA's announcement of Charlton's 2012–15 Europa League rights described the working pattern precisely: two live matches in each kick-off slot, shown across Sport 1 and Sport 2, with the weekly highlights programme on Sport 1. The same logic governed the Israeli league, where Charlton had earlier needed two pay-per-view channels simply to show simultaneous Premier League fixtures. Around the live core, the pair shares Charlton's magazine production — programmes such as the European celebration show Hagiga Eiropeit that accompanies Europa League nights live, and the weekly preview and review programmes for the English, Italian and German leagues that fill the channels between matchdays.

High definition and the red identity

Sport 2's technical coming of age lagged its sibling's by design and then caught up. Sport 1 began HD broadcasts in August 2010 as Sport 1 HD. Sport 2 followed in April 2015, when Sport 2 HD launched on yes, and in May 2015 the HD channel was added on HOT, completing the pair's high-definition transition on both major platforms. On 1 January 2020 Charlton relaunched the family's on-screen graphics with a new logo and a colour for each channel: green for Charlton and Sport 1, red for Sport 2, yellow for Sport 3 and light blue for Sport 4. The HD suffix was dropped from the logos at that point, even though standard and high definition versions of Sport 1, carrying different content outside live events, coexisted for several more years. The red identity made Sport 2 instantly distinguishable in guides and in the channels' own cross-promotion — a small but real part of how a numbered family of channels remains navigable for viewers moving between simultaneous matches.

What Sport 2 broadcasts

As the second channel of the Charlton package, Sport 2 shares the family's rights portfolio rather than holding a separate one, and its schedule is drawn from the same pool as Sport 1's. In football that pool, as catalogued in Hebrew reference coverage of Charlton, spans the Israeli Premier League and Toto Cup, the English Premier League, Championship and lower Football League divisions, the FA Cup and the English League Cup, the German Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal, the Italian Serie A and Coppa Italia, the Spanish Copa del Rey, the French Coupe de France, the Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, Turkish, Argentine and Brazilian leagues, the UEFA Europa League and Conference League, the Copa Libertadores and Major League Soccer. Beyond football, the family shows Spanish, Greek, Italian and Turkish basketball and the EuroCup, German handball and the handball Champions League, Diamond League athletics, ATP Masters 1000 tennis, and other sports including judo, boxing, volleyball and beach sports. Sport 2's distinctive contribution within that portfolio is capacity: it is the channel that turns Charlton's paper rights into watched matches whenever two fixtures collide, and the home of the second live match in slot after slot, season after season.

Carriage across Israeli platforms

Sport 2 reaches viewers as a premium subscription channel outside the basic packages of every platform that carries it. It is found at channel 52 on HOT and yes, and at the same number on Cellcom TV, which added the Charlton channels in December 2016, and on Partner TV, which added them in March 2021; it is also available through the NEXT TV and STING services. All Charlton channels are broadcast in 1080i high definition. The channel's availability history mirrors the opening of the Israeli television market: born on the two legacy platforms, cable and satellite, it followed viewers onto the newer internet-delivered services as they launched, always as a paid extra rather than a basic-tier channel. That premium status is the foundation of Charlton's economics — rights bought for very large sums are recovered from subscription revenue shared with the platforms — and it is also why the channels' pricing has been a regulatory question since before Sport 2 existed.

Regulation, pricing and public argument

No Israeli channels illustrate the politics of sports rights better than Charlton's. The 2006 World Cup, whose Israeli rights Charlton held, produced a public storm when the company initially priced the package of matches not required to be shown free at 492 shekels; after a special Knesset discussion the price was cut to 309 shekels, and to 189 with commercial sponsorship. Sport 2 itself was born under regulatory conditions designed to keep the pair cheaper than the pay-per-view regime it replaced. A decade later, when Charlton sought to add Sport 3 and Sport 4, the council's approval again came with price conditions, and Globes' coverage recorded the scepticism that new channels would simply spread attractive fixtures thinner and oblige fans to buy more. The regulator's insistence, in both eras, that the established channels' price and content be protected is effectively part of Sport 2's constitution: it is a channel whose commercial terms have repeatedly been written, in part, by its regulator.

Presenters and production

Sport 2's broadcasts are produced by Charlton's own production operation, which from the 2016/17 season used ChyronHego graphics, the TRACAB optical player-tracking system installed in Israeli Premier League stadiums, and virtual graphics placement to build its Israeli league coverage — technology the league's chief executive praised as proven in the Champions League, the Premier League and La Liga. The voices are Charlton's shared commentary pool, among the most recognisable in Israeli sport: commentators including Rami Weitz, Yoram Arbel, Liran Schechner, Moti Hviv and Sharon Davidovich, and pundits including Avi Nimni, Arik Benado, Michael Zandberg, Nir Levin and Uri Ozan, with the late Meir Einstein remembered among the company's former commentators. Because Sport 1 and Sport 2 broadcast in parallel, the pool divides across the two channels on matchdays, giving Sport 2 its own commentary teams rather than simulcasts — one more way in which the second channel is a channel in its own right and not a relay of the first.

Sport 2 in the wider family today

The family around Sport 2 has kept changing. In September 2023 Charlton announced two dedicated mobile-viewing channels branded TOGO carrying the Israeli Premier League, ending a long public dispute over the blocking of its broadcasts on mobile devices; those channels closed on 1 January 2026 as the main channels themselves became available on mobile. In January 2026 Charlton also launched Sport 6 at channel 64, alongside the retirement of Sport 1's separate standard-definition feed. Through all of it, Sport 2's position has remained the stable one defined in 2007: channel 52 everywhere, red in the family's colour code, the second live match in every crowded slot, and — with Sport 1 — the original permanent home of pay football in Israel. For Israeli viewers, the pair's creation remains the moment the country's football television settled into the subscription era, and Sport 2 is half of that settlement.