About Sport 4 (Israel)

Sport 4 (Israel)

Sport 4 is a Hebrew-language pay television sports channel in Israel, operated by Charlton Ltd of Tel Aviv. It is the fourth channel of the Charlton family and sits at channel 54 on HOT, yes, Cellcom TV and Partner TV. Sport 4 was launched in April 2017, together with Sport 3, completing the transformation of Charlton from a two-channel broadcaster into a four-channel one. If Sport 3 answered the problem of the third simultaneous match, Sport 4 answered the problem of the fourth: on the busiest Saturday afternoons and European nights, Charlton's rights portfolio could produce four or more attractive live fixtures at the same hour, and before 2017 everything beyond the second had gone unshown. Sport 4, in the family's light blue on-screen identity, is the deepest layer of the package — the channel whose existence guarantees that a Charlton subscriber can, in principle, watch any match the company owns, live, at the moment it is played.

A family of four: how Charlton got there

Sport 4's operator, Charlton, is owned by Eli Azur and Pini Zahavi and based in Tel Aviv, with Adar Zahavi as the chief executive who fronted its international announcements. The company's road to four channels ran through every model Israeli sports broadcasting has tried. In the late 1990s it showed English and Italian football through rented airtime; the combined Maccabi Haifa–Paris Saint-Germain and Beitar Jerusalem–Glasgow Rangers broadcast of 1 October 1998 drew a reported 29 percent rating but also regulatory intervention. Channel-less in the early 2000s, it could not exploit rights it held — the Italian league vanished from Israeli screens until the Sports Channel bought the rights from it. Winning the Israeli Premier League tender at the end of 2003, Charlton invented Israeli pay-per-view football with its Football Saturday channels, weathered the 2006 World Cup pricing storm in which a 492-shekel package was cut to 309 and then 189 shekels after Knesset intervention, and in 2007 won approval for Sport 1 and Sport 2 as permanent pay channels. Hebrew reference coverage counts five HD channels in the modern family; Sport 4's 2017 arrival was the step that made "five" conceivable, by proving Israeli viewers would absorb a four-channel package.

Why a fourth channel was needed

The case for Sport 4 was the case for Sport 3, squared. Football's governing bodies schedule for stadiums and global television, not for any one country's broadcaster: an English Premier League Saturday offers a full slate at one kick-off time; a Europa League Thursday offers two waves of simultaneous matches across the continent; an Israeli Premier League Saturday spreads its fixtures through the afternoon and evening. Charlton, holding Israeli rights to the Israeli league, the English leagues and cups, the German, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, Turkish, Argentine and Brazilian leagues, the Europa League and Conference League, the Copa Libertadores and MLS — plus basketball, handball, athletics and tennis — owned far more simultaneous product than even three channels could always hold. Its application to the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting, as recorded in Hebrew Wikipedia's account, originally sought four additional channels, two regular and two in HD, on the argument that rights were going unexploited and unshown. The regulator first refused, fearing a sports broadcasting duopoly; the eventual compromise gave Charlton half of what it asked — two channels — and Sport 4 is the second of them, the margin between a deep package and a complete one.

Approval with conditions, April 2017

Sport 4 launched in April 2017 as Sport 4 HD, under the same conditional approval as Sport 3. Globes' reporting on the council's decision records the two commitments extracted from Charlton: the price of the existing channels would not rise for a year, and there would be no migration of content from the veteran channels to the new ones. Globes also recorded why the second condition mattered so much and why sceptics doubted it could be policed: the attractiveness of fixtures is a matter of judgement, kick-off times cluster on Saturdays, and a broadcaster deciding which match is "central" each week holds practical power to move popular teams between channel pairs — power that could oblige fans to buy Sport 3 and Sport 4 to keep watching their own club. The council told Globes it was negotiating the details with Charlton and would withhold approval if the answers were unsatisfactory. In the event the channels rose in April 2017, and Globes reported that in the first stage Sport 3 and Sport 4 were available to existing Sport 1 and Sport 2 subscribers without additional payment — a soft launch that let the fourth channel establish itself as added value before it was ever a separate purchase decision.

What Sport 4 broadcasts

Sport 4 carries the fourth simultaneous strand of Charlton's shared portfolio, and its schedule demonstrates the portfolio's range precisely because it is where the range overflows. On a full European night that can mean a fourth live Europa League or league fixture with its own Hebrew commentary; across a season it also means the family's minority and secondary properties find airtime. The portfolio from which Sport 4 programmes are drawn, as catalogued in Hebrew reference coverage of Charlton, includes the Israeli Premier League and Toto Cup, the English Premier League, Championship, FA Cup and League Cup, Germany's Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal, Italy's Serie A and Coppa Italia, Spain's Copa del Rey, France's Coupe de France, the Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, Turkish, Argentine and Brazilian leagues, UEFA's Europa League and Conference League, the Copa Libertadores and MLS in football; the Spanish, Greek, Italian and Turkish basketball leagues and the EuroCup; German handball and the handball Champions League; Diamond League athletics and ATP Masters 1000 tennis. The breadth is not theoretical: Charlton's February 2021 agreement to broadcast Extreme E, the electric off-road racing championship, in Hebrew covered Sport 4 alongside Sport 1, Sport 2 and Sport 3 and the sport.co.il digital platform, with the company's chief executive presenting the deal as part of the family's wide-ranging sporting line-up.

Channel 54 and the light blue identity

Sport 4 sits at channel 54 on HOT, yes, Cellcom TV and Partner TV — completing the unbroken run 51 to 54 that a Charlton subscriber scans on a matchday — and is carried through NEXT TV and STING in 1080i high definition. It joined STINGTV with the rest of the family in October 2017 and arrived on Partner TV when that platform added Charlton in March 2021. On 1 January 2020 the family relaunched its graphics with an individual colour for each channel: green for Sport 1, red for Sport 2, yellow for Sport 3 and light blue for Sport 4, with the HD suffix retired from the logos. For the fourth channel the colour is functional equipment. Sport 4's audience typically arrives mid-round, remote in hand, comparing simultaneous scores; instant recognition of which channel is which — light blue means the fourth match — is part of the product the 2020 rebrand was designed to deliver, alongside the combined programmes that cut between the family's fixtures on big nights.

The controversy the fourth channel provoked

Sport 4's approval was, with Sport 3's, the immediate cause of the most publicised feud in Israeli sports media of its period. Globes described an open war between Charlton and ONE, the rival group, after years of cooling relations driven by Eli Azur's expansion in print media. ONE campaigned against the new pay channels through its website and its 102FM radio programme, fronted by Ofira Asayag, urging viewers to disconnect from yes and HOT and forecasting steep package price rises; Charlton answered with two defamation lawsuits of eight million and four million shekels. Behind the theatre lay a structural question that Sport 4 embodies. Each additional premium channel monetises the same rights portfolio more deeply, and the boundary between "showing matches that would otherwise be lost" and "spreading matches so that fans must buy everything" is exactly the boundary the cable council's no-migration condition tried to draw. Sport 4 is therefore a case study in Israeli media regulation: a channel approved on a promise about what it would not be used for.

Production and presenters

Sport 4's matches are produced by Charlton's own operation, whose technical standard was set from the 2016/17 season, when the Israeli Premier Football League and Charlton contracted ChyronHego to supply the LyricX graphics system, TRACAB optical player tracking from cameras installed in league stadiums, and virtual placement graphics for live Israeli league broadcasts — tools the league's chief executive noted were proven in the Champions League, the English Premier League and La Liga. Commentary comes from Charlton's shared pool of Israeli sports broadcasting's most familiar voices — commentators such as Rami Weitz, Yoram Arbel, Liran Schechner, Moti Hviv and Sharon Davidovich, with pundits including Avi Nimni, Arik Benado, Michael Zandberg, Nir Levin and Uri Ozan. Because four channels broadcast live at once on the fullest days, that pool staffs Sport 4 with a dedicated commentary team rather than a relay, and the channel also takes its share of the family's magazine output — the league preview and review programmes and live formats such as the European celebration show that follows a whole Europa League night across the channels.

Sport 4 in the family today

Later changes have framed Sport 4 rather than displaced it. Charlton's September 2023 launch of two mobile-only TOGO channels for Israeli league viewing, and their closure on 1 January 2026 when the main channels became available on mobile, concerned how the family is watched rather than how much of it there is. The January 2026 launch of Sport 6 at channel 64, alongside the retirement of Sport 1's separate standard-definition feed, extended the family beyond the four-channel shape Sport 4 completed in 2017. Sport 4 itself remains what its approval created: the fourth channel at position 54 on every major Israeli platform, the light blue strand of the Charlton package, launched under price and content conditions negotiated with the cable and satellite council. Its history — requested as part of a four-channel expansion, refused on duopoly grounds, granted as half of the request under subscriber protections, and fought over in public by the industry's two camps — makes it the clearest single artefact of how Israeli sports television was rebuilt, channel by numbered channel, in the subscription era.