Page 226 - Sport Culture and the Media

AFTERWORD || 207

Fans’ web sites are particularly useful for non-elite sports clubs neglected by the
mainstream media. For example, a devotee of Plymouth Argyle Football Club
living in an alien location (London, perhaps, or Australia) may take comfort (if
that is the word) every Monday morning during the soccer season in accessing
‘www.argyle.org.uk’. Members of P@SOTI (Plymouth Argyle Supporters on
the Internet) can also use its messageboard for information on how to get to
matches, to comment on team performances, or for rudimentary political
debates (such as occurred when one posted a link to a racist web site). The
site can also be used to exchange information about media sport, such as when,
in early 2003, a US-based supporter informed fellow fans in that country that
they could watch the team live in an FA Cup match on Fox Sports World (the
subsequent national humiliation described in Chapter 3 was, therefore, also
international). It is such syntheses of the speed-fixated global and the stub-
bornly local that characterize the condition of postmodernity. Larger if less
‘organic’ sports teams like Manchester United, with its ‘estimated global fan
base of 20 million’ (Sydney Morning Herald 2000: 39), are able to use their
listed Internet arm manutd.com to communicate with merchandise purchasers
in countries like India and Indonesia. The Internet can also be used to develop
additional revenue streams through ‘webcasting’ of delayed and archived
footage, although any impact on Manchester United’s own pay TV service
would have to be managed with care. With large media companies taking stakes
(from strategic to controlling) in sports teams (such as Granada Media in
Liverpool and Arsenal football clubs), and some clubs wanting to produce, sell
and distribute even their primary media content (in the form of live television,
media and sport convergence), it is advancing on several, simultaneous fronts.
The profundity, pace and profitability of change may not have matched the
optimistic predictions of the late 1990s, but there is no doubt that the sport and
cyberworlds are more than passing acquaintances, and are in the process of
becoming firm friends.
Many new developments in cybersport were caught up in the dot.com
disaster that was, ironically, ushered in by the new millennium. The case of
Quokkasports is instructive in coming to an appreciation of the distinction
between the possible and the sustainable. In early 2000, the San Francisco-
based, Nasdaq-listed company formed in 1996 was in the ascendant. As a
pioneer of interactive spectator sports, it had ‘blue chip’ strategic investors
(several of whom subsequently had their own severe problems) like Intel,
TCI/Liberty, MediaOne, British Telecom and Hearst Communications. It
managed the web site for the 2000 America’s Cup yachting race (which
registered over 800 million ‘hits’); established partnerships with Major League
Baseball, and the IOC and NBC on the 2000 Sydney Olympics, with contracts
for successive Summer and Winter Games; had the interactive rights for various