Friends, stop everything you do, put what you have in your hands aside, and wave your hands in ecstasy – redemption is already here! Israeli football is on its way to the top of the world, after the problem that has been holding it back for many years has finally been found. And what is the same problem, difficult? It’s clear – we, the fans. We are the problem! But no more. Here they found the way to take care of us, that is, the problem, here the denial of encouragement, where returning police officers to the stands, what closing stands for diversity. And rest assured, after they finish – everything will be just ten here. Europe in Israel.
What more can we, simple as we are, say in the face of such geniuses, that this is how we take care of the industry we all love? Only one thing was said to you – thank you. For that and so many other things you always do for us. We are always in your thoughts.
Thank you for giving us the right to pay eighty shekels to enter a stadium like the Eleventh in Ashdod, and sit in concrete stands straight from 1986, surrounded by sad buildings with tapestries hanging in the living room, and a proclamation echoes in our heads that insists on burning our ears On a cruise ship in Tiberias. Of course, we will give up on a normal viewing experience in advance. Only owls, scholars and people with binoculars will know how to tell what is happening at the gate far from our stand.
Thank you for planning so successfully early on in new stadiums like Turner, because if we built a stadium – why bother and also pave a road that will lead to it, if you can let everyone feel a little Dakar Rally in their private cars and lead them on a dirt road to sand-laden parking, sand and scorpions.
Thank you too, Tel Aviv-Yafo franchisees, for bothering so much to renovate Bloomfield Stadium and loading it with almost double the seating. Although you forgot to load a roof for rainy days or a normal parking lot next to it, but hey – if you did, we would not get to know the alleys of Jaffa, Holon and Bat Yam so well! In general, there is nothing like walking half an hour in each direction and wondering where your car is, or, say, paying another 20 shekels, in addition to the 110 we have already bled, to park with another 30 vehicles in the yard of a lucky man who finances a kitchen renovation with us, and have a good time .
Don ‘t think I’m depriving my city of this, do you? So a huge thank you to the wonderful Haifa Municipality, which for a decade has been doing everything it can to delay any initiative to open commercial and restaurant areas in a new stadium, and has enabled the establishment of a single restaurant. There’s no reason we should get to eat anything near the stadium without being crammed like cattle heads in a truck, or, say, visiting a club-worthy souvenir shop if one can sneak up on a poor boutique at the edge of the compound while creating new variants.
Oh, of course of course, another thank you to Mrs. Einat Kalish and her mischievous inspectors, who do not miss an opportunity to dance in the distribution of reports to cars during games. Wild boars that terrorize all the neighborhoods in the city. Maybe we should actually get mounted on the field on wild boars. The inspectors will not touch them, for sure. We just have to understand how they make us wait for us at the finish near the stand.
Thank you for the spectacular and perfect location of Netanya Stadium right in the heart of a huge shopping center and high-tech building complex. The quality time we spend in the car at the exits and getting there allows us to get to know each other better and extend the common pastime. After all, we all like to get home at 1:30 and get up the next morning for work as usual, just because it was not in your head to also add some logical road to the entrance and exit of the stadium you built.
Thanks for the long, long years of work around Teddy, with no end in sight. Aerobics to face, up and down like that in a run to the stadium there. Why running, you ask? Because no matter when you go out, with the impossible traffic jams and zero parking that there is in this place, you are doomed to having to play in almost any situation.
Thanks also to the friends at Green Stadium, for the nostalgic experience of cold and rain without a roof. There is nothing to talk about normal parking at all. Only in the last cycle were we there, at half our normal amount (and the stadium contents), and we had to wander up mountains and hills to put the car. It is a great pleasure that such stadiums are approved for the Premier League, in Israel, or anywhere else in the world.
Special thanks, so big, for the sheer fun, the ongoing pleasure called Doha Stadium. There’s nothing like getting stones and bottles to your stand because you have scored a victory gate, with a cop standing next to you and giving you a look of “what am I going to do with this atonement, what do I look like to you Captain America?”. In general, there is nothing like driving home from a road that is racially called “Escape Road”, too bad they emptied away the garbage and corpses of the sheep that were once there, completely detracting from the overall “Black Hawk Down” experience we have every time we get to this place.
Thank you for canceling the price categories and going back to the days of “fuck a checkout according to your ability” at our expense, thank you for caresses all over the body from security guards, sausages with a dingo flavor at the price of a first hand car, thank you for services cleaned once every six months (if at all), thank you “Breastfeeders who are looking for a place to vent their aggression (and find it in us), thank you for pampering cash fees, thank you for collective punishment and closing closures, thank you for double collection of entrance tickets as a result of those penalties, to suck a little more at our money and special thanks to Do not plan work according to the load of five thousand vehicles traveling on the road at night, continue to knock us road works back from any lot without account. We need that time in the car to complete listening to podcasts.
Thank you, association, police, authorities, for all these and much more. Know what? Maybe, in fact, I’m making a huge mistake here, and we’re not the ones to say thank you.
Maybe before you run to take care of all the sickness of Israeli football for people who just want to see their team every week on the pitches, you should take care of everything that is screwed up, sick and crooked in our football, which is everything else. There will always be rioting and problematic fans. And they are perhaps one percent of a huge, normative and captive audience. So maybe, just maybe, you’re actually the ones who should say thank you to us. Thank you for the fact that we, the football fans, were and remain the almost the only reason for the existence of this industry in Israel.
The writer is a Maccabi Haifa fan
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