Page 40 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 21

security and comfort standards were low. The ‘classical’ mass production
capitalist principle of producing as much of the same commodity as cheaply
as possible took hold in spectator sport from the late nineteenth century
onwards. By the second decade of the twentieth century, ‘Spectator sport was
[now] attracting massive crowds’ (Clarke and Critcher 1985: 74), especially of
working-class men. On this basis, a whole economy of sport developed as:

• sporting clubs and associations were formed by subscribing members;
• competitions were established with attractive prize money;
• imposing venues with large crowd capacities were built;
• a labour market (often feudalistic until player revolts) grew up to
handle the transfer and valuation of professional and semi-professional
‘sportsworkers’;
• state funds were donated to the development of sport;
• sportswear and fan merchandise were manufactured and sold;
• and (of particular significance for this book) newspapers, magazines,
newsreels, films, radio (and, later, television) programmes became devoted
to sport.

The initial development of the commercial side of sport paralleled that of other
forms of entertainment, with more and more information about sports events
and the people involved in them (especially the new sports celebrities) provided
by a panoply of publications from newspaper sports columns to specialist
sports newspapers and magazines. But prime dependency on paying spectators
physically transporting themselves to particular events limited its potential for
expansion. A vast, untapped audience existed that could, by means of develop-
ing audiovisual technology, be relieved of the necessity to travel to sports events
– instead, the games would come to the audience (Rowe 1996). Yet how could
this large, dispersed ‘crowd’, which was neither never likely to meet each other
nor approach a sports stadium, be turned into a market capable of turning a
profit? The answer, of course, is that listeners and viewers – especially the latter,
on account of television’s power to simulate ‘real time’, sensory experience –
would not pay directly to see sport (except by bearing the cost of electronic
equipment, electricity and, in some countries, a licence). Instead, another party
(advertised businesses) would arrange and pay for them to watch sport and
selected messages through a third party (television). While this ‘free-to-air’
television transmission of sport is now supplemented and even threatened by a
re-instatement of direct payment for service through subscription and pay-per-
view TV (Roche 2000; Rowe 2003), it is still overwhelmingly dominant on the
most important sports media occasions (like the Olympics and the Super Bowl)
when the sheer size of the audience generates enormous advertising, sponsor-
ship and TV rights revenue. The popularity of sport, then, became an economic