Dr. Haim Hagay
Lecturer at The Department of Communication Studies, Kinneret Academic College. His research interests include the intersection of sports media and nationalism, sports media and gender, sports journalism and media production studies.
Twitter: @haimhagay
Email: haimhagay@mx.kinneret.ac.il
Dr. Alina Bernstein
Senior Lecturer at the School of Media Studies, College of Management Academic Studies, and at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research focuses on sport, media, and society, with particular interests in gender, national identity, and the representation of sport in digital and social media.
Email: alinabernstein@gmail.com
Twitter: @alinabernstein
Israel did not qualify for the 2026 World Cup — one might say, as usual. Ranked 76th in the world, it has reached the tournament only once, in 1970, and was pushed out of Asian football soon afterwards when Arab and Muslim states refused to play it, eventually landing in UEFA. Israelis have therefore been supporting other people’s teams for half a century. What was new in 2026 was the basis for their choice.
Adopting somebody else’s team is not an Israeli peculiarity. The literature points to three broad routes. One is identity-based: a symbolic connection through shared ethnicity, religion, region or ideology — diasporic loyalty, or the pan-Arab and pan-African solidarities that embraced Morocco in 2022 and resurfaced more conditionally in 2026. A second is mediated: globalization and social media build loyalties detached from territory, often centered on athletes rather than teams through what Horton and Wohl called a parasocial relationship. A third is situational: when your own country fails to qualify, you adopt a substitute for the tournament. After the United States missed the 2018 World Cup, American fans largely chose replacement teams for footballing rather than personal or ancestral reasons.
Israel’s version carries an additional, overtly political layer. After two years of war in Gaza, Israelis felt an acute sense of international isolation. UEFA came close to a vote on suspending Israel in the autumn of 2025, and the qualifying campaign unfolded under the possibility of expulsion. The isolation supplied the axis along which Israelis sorted the tournament: not who plays well, but who has been decent to us.
That sorting has a name in the marketing literature: the animosity model, in which consumers avoid products from countries toward which they hold political or historical grievances, regardless of the product’s merits — a dynamic documented among Israeli Jewish consumers toward Germany. What was striking in 2026 was how openly and how widely it was applied to football.
The roster itself was not stable, and 2026 shows how it was rewritten. In 2014, research found the Netherlands the most supported team among Jewish Israelis, credited with sheltering Jews during the Holocaust, while Germany, Iran and Algeria led the teams Israelis wanted to see lose. Twelve years later Germany had been absolved, and a satirical World Cup supplement in Yedioth Ahronoth was explicit about why: “our grandparents would not have dared buy German-made toenail clippers, but now that Israel is short of friends it is legitimate to keep a passport photo of Florian Wirtz in your wallet”. The grievance had not aged out. It had been outbid. Qatar, widely seen in Israel as Hamas’s patron, inherited the vacancy — the ledger ran on present need, not history.
Those same pages plotted the whole field on a grid: one axis for footballing quality, the other for relations with Israel, running from “a date at sunset” down to “may it go on their medical bills”. Spain, called attractive but antisemitic, was portrayed as attacking with Palestinian flags in an operation dubbed “Swords of Pep”. The grid does what the scholarship does not: researchers treat team quality and government friendliness as competing explanations for foreign support, but Israeli readers were handed both as axes and invited to trade one against the other — and the relations axis was the live one.
A website launched during the tournament worked through the entire fixture list,telling Israelis which side to support in every match. Whether it was joking was never entirely clear. One entry backed Cape Verde over Spain: Cape Verde was praised for preserving Sephardi memory, while Spain was credited with its Jewish golden age but blamed for the 1492 expulsion and recent anti-Israel politics. That 1492 could be charged against Spain the same season 1945 was written off for Germany is the point: an old grievance became usable only through the present relationship.
Broadcasters made the question a recurring feature, pre-match shows returning night after night whom Israelis ought to support. By the eve of the final it had reached the top of the state: Netanyahu received Argentina’s ambassador and sent Milei a message his office posted — Javier, you are a true friend, we support you and Argentina tomorrow. The order is the argument in miniature: the team was an appendage of the friendship, not its object.
This invites an objection — Israelis loved Messi long before they had heard of Milei. True, and precisely the point: Messi had been there for twenty years, the ambassador had not. The team Israelis had the strongest political reason to adopt was also the team they would plausibly have adopted anyway — isolation simply moved that preference from the living room into the prime minister’s diary.
In the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Analysis we described how social media fragmented Israel’s national media event, turning medals into occasions for internal conflict. In 2026 there were no medals and no team, and the argument turned outward: for a month Israelis spent less time fighting one another than sorting everybody else. What they were sorting was not football, but who had been decent to us — the tournament followed as a running tally of Israel’s standing in the world. The same supplement let the quieter thing slip in its entry on Curaçao, population 150,000, which had qualified: “what have they contributed to humanity, and why are they there and we are not?”.
