Page 102 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 83

precedents in other European countries, such as French broadcaster Canal Plus’s
ownership of Paris St German and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s
control of A.C. Milan, or Murdoch’s ownership of the LA Dodgers. While
the institutions of sport and media may have substantially merged or inter-
penetrated, their constituent organizations have in most cases remained formally
distinct. For systematic, comprehensive organizational integration to occur in
sport will not only be determined by state and suprastate industry regulation.
The synergies that appear so attractive on corporate business plans may not
materialize in practice given the added complexity of the operation, with the
media, entertainment and sports industries providing several instances of
public floats, acquisitions and mergers (including AOL Time Warner, English
Premier League and Italian Serie A club flotations, and European pay TV
operations in Germany and Italy) that have not performed as anticipated.
Nonetheless, by 2002 Murdoch held stakes in English League clubs Manchester
United, Leeds and Chelsea, and late in that year was expressing interest in
the purchase of leading Serie A club Lazio from the Cirio food group (The
Australian 2002: 29). The sport market, nevertheless, remains an uncertain one
(Magee 2002; Wild 2002), as is graphically represented by the notorious 1995
incident (a photograph of which provides the cover image for Boyle and Haynes
2000) when Eric Cantona of Manchester United performed a flying kick on a
spectator who was abusing him. The resultant bad publicity meant that ‘more
than £3m was wiped off Manchester United’s share price’, a ‘minor fluctuation’
that could be magnified many times by poor results on the field (Gardner
1998: 4).
The changing economics of broadcasting popular sports events – sometimes
held in check as we have seen by public political values or by the desire of major
sports organizations like the IOC to ensure maximum television exposure –
nonetheless continually modify the conditions under which media sports texts
are made. For example, the timing of ‘live’ sports broadcasts is now dictated by
the need to stagger them over several days and nights, and/or to give a number
of parties the opportunity to show whatever material to which they have gained
access. Thus, while as recently as the 1970s most professional British soccer
matches or Australian rugby league games started and ended on the same week-
end day within 15 minutes of each other, the ‘festival’ of football now stretches
over much of the week in the sports media equivalent of continuous process
production. As seasons have extended and competitions proliferated in
deference to the media hunger for sport – and to sport’s appetite for media
money – the prospect of creating a media sports cultural complex that defies
the constraints of time and space – just as the first factory owners began to do
in the eighteenth century – approaches closer. The difference, however, is
that much of the population is now viewing the production process from the