Page 127 - Sport Culture and the Media

108 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

was, in fact, postponed because of disagreements over TV rights, with Italian
public broadcaster RAI offering ‘to pay the nation’s football league only half
the EUR88 million (AU$157 million) it paid last year to show highlights of
matches’ (McCathie 2002: 20). The result has been stagnation in the player
market as:
Worries about the balance sheets shredded by years of over-spending on
players and fears the television-rights bubble is about to burst, mean club
chairmen now tell their coaches a player’s price matters as much as his
quality.
(Huggins 2003: 30)

Television executives like the Chief Executive of the Australian Nine Network,
Ian Johnson, are now repeating minor variations on the mantra that:

‘Sport is so expensive, the networks just cannot afford to be paying what
we have in the past. Any sporting body that has been the recipient of huge
sporting-rights fees should be putting it in the bank and thanking their
lucky stars they signed those deals when they did, because it won’t be
happening again’.
(in Eckersley and Benton 2002: 20)

There is no doubt that the broadcast sports rights contracts being (re)negoti-
ated in the wake of the recession in sports television will be, for the foreseeable
future, rather less favourable for peak sports organizations and clubs, and that
there will be a negative economic impact on coaches, elite athletes, and so on
given the prime importance of media capital to sport. As noted earlier, many
major sports have been ‘loss leaders’ for converged media corporations, but
the principle of the ‘loss leader’ is that what is lost in the direct transaction is
more than matched by the income from other sources that it stimulates. This
balance has been, at least temporarily in many cases, lost. The recession in
TV sport has also led to a round of collapses and mergers, creating a number of
TV monopolies and quasi-monopolies. This has placed television in a stronger
bargaining position with sport.
It is always dangerous to commit the sin of ‘presentism’, the belief that what
currently holds will be for ever thus. Observers of the hi-tech Nasdaq stock
market index will grasp this point well, and if they are investors will now have
a visceral understanding of it. When the first edition of this book was written
in the late 1990s, there was little sign of the wreckage in TV sport ahead. It
might be that, in a further five years, circumstances will have again changed
dramatically, and a new cohort of TV and sports executives, sportspeople and
viewers will be afflicted with the amnesia that turns so much of contemporary
life into a blur of buzzwords, beliefs and fantasies. In the English Premier