Page 121 - Sport Culture and the Media

102 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

across the globe. The business pages of newspapers, by 2002, began to speak of
media sport calamities and, for the first time, that sport had become the ‘sick
man’ of the cultural industries in articles such as the following:
Suddenly, it seems, the business of sport is in serious trouble. The looming
shake-out is likely to affect everyone from media to clubs, players and the
fans. The warning flags have been flying for months, now the sirens are
blaring. Sport is in real trouble around the world, and some large codes are
on life support. The drama that is unfolding this weekend in dressing rooms
and club boardrooms is like nothing the sport industry has seen before.
(Chenoweth and O’Riordan 2002: 21)
The cause of the crisis, given the co-dependent relationship of sport and tele-
vision, lies with the failure of the media to match revenue to expenditure, a
problem that they, in turn, pass on to the sports that they have enriched. The
extent of the problem in television sport is revealed when it is recognized that
the ‘weekend’ referred to immediately above occurred during probably its
greatest global festival – the World Cup of association football, staged in
Japan and Korea but reaching out to the four corners of the earth. It is extra-
ordinary to talk of the crisis of media sport when, in the wake of the World
Cup, FIFA issued the following press release containing information that
trumpeted the global success of the tournament. Given that global audience
figures for mega-media sports events have tended to be based on ‘guesstimates’
and marketing (de Moragas Spà et al. 1995), FIFA took a more cautious and
rigorous approach to audience measurement, but still produced extraordinary
figures:
Television coverage reached 213 countries, virtually every country in the
world, with over 41,100 hours of dedicated programming. This represents
a 38% increase in coverage over the 1998 event and sets a new record for a
single sporting event. Contrary to some expectations, live audiences were
not affected by the time zone differences for viewers in Europe and Central
and South America. In fact, the cumulative live audience showed an overall
increase on the 1998 figures.
Although the overall global audience was down on France 98, this decline
was entirely due to the introduction of audited audience measurement
in China for the first time, which allows for more accurate reporting...
The cumulative audience over the 25 match days of the 2002 event
reached a total of 28.8 billion viewers. The corresponding audience for
France 98, with unaudited viewing figures for China, reported 33.4 billion.
However, if China is excluded from the statistics for both events, the totals
show an increase of 431.7 million viewers (+2%) this year.