Page 100 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 81

in Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand and the small number of other
countries in which it is played as ‘one of News Corp.’s bigger blunders’ (quoted
in Miller 1998b: 5). Expensive acquisition has, however, been a major part of
News Corporation’s global strategy (Andrews 2004). When a big financial
player like Murdoch is sufficiently determined to make a major impact on a
sport, the outcome is inevitably far-reaching, and the means by which that
influence is exerted always involves media, especially television coverage. Thus,
while Murdoch’s strategy includes taking a stake not just in the sports media
but in sport itself (hence his purchase of major stakes in rugby union and rugby
league, and the ownership of individual sports outfits like the Los Angeles
Dodgers baseball team), it is always the promise of wider TV coverage and
cross-media exposure through his newspaper and magazine interests that forms
part of the ‘pitch’. Furthermore, when new forms of delivery involving sub-
scription are involved, no media identity understands the importance of sport
more than Rupert Murdoch. The turning around of his BSkyB satellite service
in Britain (News Corporation is its 40 per cent majority shareholder) from a
chronically loss-making to a highly profitable business entity can be traced
directly to his securing of prime exclusive rights in 1992 to many of the most
important games in Britain’s national sport – soccer. In this task, he was given
substantial encouragement by the more neo-classical economic elements of the
Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher, who disliked the public/
private free-to-air duopoly of the BBC and ITV in free market terms almost as
much as they loathed the BBC’s news and current affairs on political grounds
(Goodwin 1998). Since 1992, BSkyB has made several multi-million pound
deals in sports like golf (including the Ryder Cup), cricket, rugby union and
boxing, sometimes in association with the BBC and Channel 4. Not only have
these contracts, with their strong elements of exclusive ‘live’ rights, had the
effect of raising subscription levels, but also they have in some cases (including
boxing and soccer) included a pay-per-view element, with its opportunities
for the kind of direct economic exchange between sports provider (now via
an intermediary) and sports spectator that once existed only at the turnstiles of
sports stadia.
By turning the television set-top decoding box into an electronic turnstile,
pay-per-view and subscription sport are, paradoxically, via new media delivery
technology, recreating an older cash nexus. But now sports themselves are
ceding to the media, for a handsome price, responsibility for the presentation of
great sporting occasions to the largest component of the audience. The political
implications of this shift are serious (as is argued more fully below), in that the
new services – and many of the old ones – are now available only to those
citizens with the capacity to pay. As Combe (1997) notes, BSkyB’s premium, live
and exclusive sports coverage enabled it, by 1996, to gain 5.1 per cent of channel