Page 225 - Sport Culture and the Media

206 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

a television image through software that converts it into a graphic representa-
tion of the game. It’s the next best thing to television, and allows fans to
replay match action again and again’ (Hadfield, quoted in Austin and Harper
1998: 4). A cursory check in July 1998 through the Yahoo! search engine’s UK
and Ireland sites found 4271 categories and 14,591 sites devoted to sport. By
April 2003, there were 126 densely organized ‘Directory Category Matches’ and
almost 40 million ‘Web Matches’. All major and many minor sports now have
web sites dedicated to merchandising and marketing (among other functions),
just as all major media organizations have online information services. As Tom
Loosemore, a senior producer of BBC Online states:
On the Web, the live is much less important than the nearly live – the real
value is the Monday morning syndrome, when you come into work and
catch up with the goals you missed at the weekend. The secret, in my
opinion, is a comprehensive and up-to-the-minute news sports offering
that gives you all the background that TV and radio can’t give you, when
you want it.
(quoted in Austin and Harper 1998: 4)

This conception of the (mostly male) white-collar worker logging on in search
of the latest sports news points to a future of ever more abundant and readily
available media sports texts. Rather than, as is often the case, this being seen as
a ‘zero sum’ game within and between media, as new forms inevitably supplant
others, it is instead the co-existence and constant supplementation of the
existing sports media. Assuming that saturation point is not reached – and on
current indicators it seems far distant as sports fans absorb more media content
and the media recruit more sports fans – the only likely outcome is maximal
media sport, more minutely targeted. Women, for example, as was noted in
Chapter 6, were once neglected by sports press and television. They are now
watching some sports (like association football) and some events (like the
Olympics) in very significant numbers, but there is certainly room to develop
female audiences across the spectrum of sports. As discussed in Chapter 2,
newspaper sports editors are also looking to expand their still modest female
readerships. The latest media male and female audience frontier for sport is
cyberspace. For the diminishing ranks of the sports-resistant global population,
the only alternative, as implied in the Introduction, may be solitary
confinement.
The Internet has enabled an extension not only of the ways by which the
professional media can contact sports fans, but also of those same fans’ oppor-
tunities to communicate with each other. Newsgroups like ‘rec.sport.soccer’
allow sports fans to debate issues like ground safety and the merits of different
teams and players, while netzines operate as both sports forum and shrine.