Page 120 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 101

‘anaemic’, but one finance journalist using more dramatic language in judging
it to be the ‘worst fall-off in overall ad spending since World War II’ (McCarthy
2002: 2A). In discussing intense competition for advertising revenue between
the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and Super Bowl XXXVI in New
Orleans (the latter having been put back to just five days before the start of the
former because of the assault on the Twin Towers), there is some surprise that
there is seemingly not enough room in the huge American media sport market
for two such prime events to flourish. Media sport seems now to be subject to
orthodox laws of supply and demand, with Tony Ponturo, vice president of
global media and sports marketing for the major brewer Anheuser-Busch, the
biggest advertiser at the 2002 Super Bowl and Olympic sponsor, stating ‘The
U.S. media market is glutted with more sports and entertainment properties
than there is ad money to go round’ (McCarthy 2002: 2B). Ironically, on the
same page, USA Today advertises its online coverage of the Winter Olympics,
thereby illustrating the ‘glutted’ condition of the US media market.
The result has been a US$3 billion dollar write-down of US sports rights
alone, about a third of which is accounted for by News Corporation
(Chenoweth and O’Riordan 2002). This is not just an American problem,
although the combination in the United States of over-production, cultural
protectionism and sporting introversion has exacerbated and accelerated the
decline of the media sports market (Miller et al. 2003). Competition in that
market has also led to such desperate initiatives as the formation in 2001 of
XFL, an American football tournament launched by the World Wrestling
Federation and broadcast by the once dominant in sport, now eclipsed network
NBC. The rationale was to offer a spiced up version of gridiron that borrowed
from the hyped, parodic presentational techniques of the ‘pseudo sport’ of
wrestling. XFL did not see another football or TV season, having ‘delivered the
lowest prime-time ratings of any of the four networks’ and ‘lost XFL and NBC
[US]$35m each’ (Brookes 2002: 14). NBC, locked out of broadcasting the major
sports leagues by exorbitant rights, tried again in 2003 when it covered the
Arena Football League, ‘a hybrid sport that is much quicker and higher-scoring
than the NFL’ that has existed for 17 seasons (Rubino 2003), albeit promoting it
in a more restrained manner than XFL (Sandomir 2003: 4). The establishment
of such new sports competitions by media companies and sports is a sign not of
the health of media sport, but of the unsustainable contractual arrangements
that currently exist. Morgan Stanley has predicted that total major US TV
network losses on sport in the period 2002–6 will be US$1.3 billion (Miller
et al. 2003).
The shock to the sporting system that there can be such a thing as ‘negative
growth’ (the expression used by economists when they can’t bring themselves to
say something straightforward like ‘shriveling wealth’) has now registered