In recent days, the member of the Knesset, the future minister - Bezalel Smotrich made the headlines the issue of football games on Saturday.
On the one hand - football on Shabbat prevents and alienates thousands of football fans from the field and prevents many talented Shabbat keepers from reaching the high levels.
On the other hand - for years it is customary to play football on Saturday, a very convenient day to come to the field with the children.
This controversy will accompany us for some time.
But on one thing - the Shabbat keepers, and those who are not, including all football fans agree - without an audience on the field, there is no point in the game.
So how did it happen that even in the current football season tens of thousands of football fans are excluded from the fields?
The answer: radius of course!
The radius penalty without an audience is a collective, inferior, obtuse and anachronistic penalty that the football court inflicts on all those who come to the football field following a riot of hundreds, dozens and sometimes single fans.
Here, a few weeks ago the Hapoel Tel Aviv fans sitting behind the goal particularly blatantly interfered with the normal course of the Tel Aviv derby in which they lost to the city rival.
What will the association do?
Will you learn from England, Spain, Italy and just about every other country and keep the rioters away?
No way!
Why punish a few when you can punish everyone?
So the judge at the football court decided not to turn away specific fans or to close the stands - but to punish all those who intended to come to the game that takes place at all a few weeks later, between Beitar and Hapoel and to hermetically close the field to the entry of fans.
Did you understand that?
Beitar fans, who were not at all a party to the matter, cannot come to cheer their team in an important game, because of an event in which they did not participate at all.
Do you remember that once upon a time if a soldier broke guard the whole platoon would stay on Shabbat?
So the court of the association sitting in Zion decided: why punish the soldier who broke guard if it is possible for the entire IDF, including soldiers from other bases to close on Shabbat?
Unfortunately, all over the world there are crowd riots at the pitches, in most countries the riots are many times more serious than what is customary in Israel - do they close pitches there?
Only in an extremely rare case, and it almost never happens at all.
But with us?
Why argue about football on Saturday or on a weekday - when you can just punish everyone and close the field, because of individual riots?
This is a call to Israel's next sports minister on behalf of all soccer fans in the country and regardless of the color of their team's uniform and what symbol they have on the shirt - before you take care of anything else - please, on behalf of all soccer lovers in Israel - stop this unnecessary collective punishment.
Close this corner for us - then we'll go back to arguing about football on Saturday or on a weekday.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
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