Solomon, Peretz and dreams of the Premier League: The English second division gets underway
Broadcasting rights worth hundreds of millions of pounds, scorching stands, three Israelis, one Hollywood star and no VAR. The English Championship opens the season, presenting the most immersive, romantic and authentic football there is.
Towards the end of the 2023/24 season, six months after a new contract was signed to regulate Premier League broadcasting rights for 6.7 billion pounds, the time came to reach an agreement with the rest of the professional leagues in England. While the unprecedented amount for broadcasts from the best league in the world surprised no one, quite a few eyebrows were raised when it turned out how much the rights cost for the rest of the leagues, from the Championship to the second league, which is actually the fourth: no less than 895 million pounds (plus 40 million in marketing royalties) the Sky network agreed to pay for the right to broadcast teams that only the late Avi Meller knew.
Naturally, the Championship is the locomotive pulling the train, which points to unusual attractiveness compared to a league that is at a level equivalent to the National League in Israel. And indeed, the Championship, which gets underway today with Manor Solomon (West Ham), Daniel Peretz (Southampton) and Lisab Issat (Bristol City), is a phenomenon in itself. The meeting between top teams in crisis, small teams with a rich tradition and teams that started as a fantasy of a few crazy people from a remote town creates an immersive soap opera, where what happens in the stands is no less interesting than what happens on the grass and in the locker room.
Ask, for example, the fans of Millwall, one of the most notorious in all of Europe, whose team from a London district has never played in the Premier League since the league's inception in 1992. Three times it was on the verge of promotion until it succumbed to the "Millwall curse". The failure last season was the most stinging of all: Millwall missed out on automatic promotion from second place at the last moment and lost on aggregate in the playoff semi-final to Hull City, who finished in sixth place with ten points less. In the 80s and 90s, such a stinging failure would have ended in a riot. This time the police managed to contain the event, and it can be assumed that the Premier League managers breathed a sigh of relief: at least in the current season, Millwall fans will continue to sing "No one likes us, we don't care" at Championship matches. By the way, for Solomon's information: the team's rivalry with West Ham is considered particularly stormy, and it goes back to the beginning of the 20th century and the rivalry between dock workers from competing companies.
On the other hand, its arrival in the league of a phenomenon like Wrexham, which was an amateur team from Wales until it was purchased by movie star Ryan Reynolds and became the focus of a docu-series on Disney+, attracted a different kind of spotlight. Just this week, an elderly couple from Texas made headlines, announcing their permanent move to Wrexham following what they were exposed to through the screen: "We got a feeling there that we didn't find anywhere in the United States," the two said. "Thank God they didn't watch 'Chernobyl'," Reynolds reacted.
Electrifying atmosphere
However, the neighborhood charm should not be misleading: it is the richest league in Europe among the second-tier football leagues, and even more than the Euroleague in basketball. The average attendance last season was more than 20 thousand per game. In a dense and busy schedule, where each team plays 23 home games and quite a few fanatics also travel to away games, it is a serious commitment, which creates an electrifying atmosphere and endless Cinderella stories. It is not for nothing that the club owners voted for a decision to increase the playoff stage in the coming season, from four to six teams. This is intended to realize the dramatic potential that occurs at the end of every season, when the teams at the top of the table that did not qualify automatically from the first two places will get a chance to fight for the third ticket to the Premier League. The meaning is that even the team that finished in eighth place(!) can still find itself in the following season fighting against Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool.
On the other hand, in an effort to preserve the aura of the game before it became a toy for billionaires and oil principalities, the decision was made not to use any kind of VAR system, which wreaked havoc in the Premier League and to a large extent decided both the championship and the identity of the third relegated team in that same match between Arsenal and West Ham. The teams were offered a slightly different and cheaper system in a format that resembles the challenge in the NBA: twice per game each coach can demand the referee to re-examine a decision. Even this seemed unnecessary, burdensome and uneconomical to them. When looking at the poor satisfaction data of VAR, one can guess that Premier League team fans are bursting with envy.
Between Peretz and Solomon
For fans from Israel, the presence of Peretz, Issat and especially Solomon is a relatively new option in football and shopping trips, as far as these are possible subject to one war or another. On October 24, for example, West Ham will host Southampton at the London Stadium, when in the same round of the Premier League there will also be the derby between Chelsea and Tottenham at Stamford Bridge. But even without blue-and-white excuses, it is evident that the Championship manages to maintain its status as an unobvious combination of old and new, which is becoming harder to do in the top league, where the top tends to remain fixed and the most spoken language is money. Playing in such a demanding and competitive league is definitely not a consolation prize, but watching it feels like a kind of compensation for what was and is no more.
