Page 125 - Sport Culture and the Media

106 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

services industry have proven to be wildly optimistic, and many nation states
(and some sports organizations like the IOC) remain stubbornly opposed to the
exclusive capture of the prime sports content that would force a massive rise
in subscription numbers. By 2003, the World Broadcasting Unions (WBU)
organization and its constituent members like the EBU, the Asia-Pacific Broad-
casting Union (ABU) and the Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU), mounted
a strong counter-attack in defence of open public broadcasting of sport. One
Japanese broadcaster, for example, argued for a change to broadcasting
arrangements that led to the sudden fading from Japanese consciousness of the
World Cup that they had co-hosted. This state of affairs, its representative
argued, was caused by the exclusive control of post-World Cup images by pay
TV (Fujiwara 2003: 24). An Arab broadcaster, similarly, argued that sports
federations should ‘rehabilitate the role of broadcasting unions to ensure that
sport does not only become the privilege of those rich enough to afford it’
(Harguem 2003: 23). There is, of course, a strong element of self-interest in
such arguments, but they mark a detectable turning of the tide in the affairs of
sports TV after several years of discursive dominance by neoclassical economic
philosophy wedded to in-practice commercial oligopoly.
These developments might be the source of a little ironic pleasure in witness-
ing the puncturing of hubris and give comfort that television sport is still
afforded some protection from complete commodification. But these positive
feelings are mitigated by their disruptive impact on sport, which has become
dependent on the television drip feed. Many sports organizations took the
unsustainable amounts of media money and spent it on equally unsustainable
player payments, which have often absorbed 75 per cent of total revenues.
As clubs and teams concentrated their efforts on poaching each others’ elite
athletes, and caring little for smaller sports organizations or the long-term
infrastructure of the game (such as ‘bringing on’ young sportspeople), many
have accumulated huge debts. Having mortgaged their futures, sports teams
bloated by force-fed TV funds now face severe cutbacks and even insolvency.
In the case of UK soccer, for example, a boom has been proclaimed and
validated by the signing of leading players from other countries (facilitated by
international sports labour market de-regulation and lured by multi-million
pound contracts; see Miller et al. 2001; Magee 2002; Magee and Sugden 2002;
McGovern 2002). But there is now a strong sense of impending doom:

The British football industry is in financial crisis. Any other business might
be pronounced dead and buried but this sector is different: when it comes
to the people’s game, the heart still very much rules the head.
Despite the financial turmoil – wiser heads might say reality – that has
crashed down on the sport over the past 12 months, the hopes of fans,