Page 118 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 99

2002: 20). It presaged a development that many in media sport could barely
imagine – the end of the TV rights party.

When sports television fails

In recent decades, there has been a long boom in media sport. As noted
above, sports desks and the pages that they create have greatly expanded
(Tunstall 1996), and sports magazines have appeared and folded with signal
frequency. Some inroads have been made by sports Internet services, with
Rod Brookes (2002: 46) observing that ‘whereas a number of household names
on the Internet are only expected to be profitable in the long term, Internet
companies producing sports content are already generating significant revenue’.
For print and the Internet, technological innovations, convergence strategies,
shifts in advertising revenue, changes in audience patterns, and the ‘shake-
down’ from the ‘dot.bomb’ collapse of information technology stocks and
investment, have all created a dynamic media sport environment. But, as we
have seen, the major driving force of media sport has been television, which has
injected funds in ‘telephone book numbers’ into sport in pursuit of broadcast
rights. In parallel with the information technology boom (Shiller 2000),
television sport has been deeply involved in a frenzied inflationery round of
purchasing desirable business ‘properties’, in this case broadcast rights and,
preferably, the entities that wholly or partially own those rights. Also in com-
mon with the bizarre billion-dollar venture capital purchase of startup Internet
companies was the belief that the rise in the market would never end, that a
‘new economy’ had replaced the old one that was so chronically subject to
a cycle of boom and bust, and that this investment could be used as a platform
on which to increase revenue streams created by organizational synergies and
emerging consumer needs.
The ‘iron laws’ of capital accumulation, however, are not so easily set aside,
although the sports industry did for some time seem weightless (Miller 1999).
At some point, investment, expenditure and revenue must be brought into the
same ballpark (to use an appropriate sporting metaphor). In the early twenty-
first century, it became apparent that television sport, for all its fin de siècle
success, had in many cases over-reached itself. There has followed a retrench-
ment that is increasingly registering as a ‘red needle’ across the media sports
cultural complex, with several instances of companies folding, advertising
revenues shrinking, subscription numbers stagnating, broadcast rights deals
contracting, sportspeople’s incomes falling and TV screens fading to black.
It is uncertain whether this is a temporary market correction or will have
longstanding ramifications, but there is no doubt that television sport has