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MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 69

located. To illustrate this point, we need only point to the cut-throat com-
petition and multi-million dollar and pound investment involved in acquiring
such mega media sports properties as the broadcast rights to the:
• Summer and Winter Olympics
• English Premier League soccer
• US National Football League
(Rowe and McKay 2003). That media sport involves serious money is obvious,
but the cultural and economic consequences for media sports texts are less
apparent. For this reason, we need to delve further into the place where
economic and sporting muscles are flexed.

Sport, media and capital accumulation

In Chapter 1, I provided brief outlines of the intersecting development of sport
and media, arguing that each institution had something that the other wanted –
and with increasing urgency. The initial reluctance which both parties displayed
in forming a deep alliance was, in part, due to the unprecedented nature of
the economic and cultural relations that developed speedily from the late
nineteenth century onwards (that is, consumer capitalism and national state-
sanctioned media were ‘feeling their way’), and partly because their initial eco-
nomic base relied on direct exchange. So, when most of the revenue for sports
enterprises stemmed from paying customers going through the turnstiles to
watch sport in person in highly localized settings, not much in the way of mass
marketing and promotion was needed. Word-of-mouth, wall posters and some
rather staid newspaper advertisements were the major means of informing the
paying public about forthcoming sports events, and the technological means
did not exist (and when they did, were not initially welcomed) to record and
transmit proceedings for those not present (Stoddart 1986; Whannel 1992;
Boyle and Haynes 2000). Similarly, for newspapers more dependent on revenue
from cover sales than on advertising, and interested more in the great events
of state (as in the establishment press) or in scandal-mongering (the province
of the ‘yellow press’), sport had only limited appeal. With the development
of national and international sporting competitions, the maturation of media
advertising and the emergence of broadcast media for which there was no or
limited direct payment by the ‘consumer’, new revenue streams and uses of
the sports media were created. In this way, the media sports text became
increasingly valorized, a commodity that could be produced, sold, exchanged
and distributed. To understand precisely how the media sports text becomes
such a valuable economic and cultural object, it is necessary to view it in terms