Page 93 - Sport Culture and the Media

74 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

and use fitting perfectly contemporary requirements for speedy change and
customization.
Media sports texts are perhaps, then, at the leading edge of this culturaliza-
tion of economics: they cannot be eaten or worn yet billions of people desire
them in a bewildering variety of types, and media corporations are willing
to expend billions of units of currency to supply them, often ‘free of charge’,
to the user. In return, as we have seen, invaluable access is given to audiences,
on a global scale, which can be cashed in for large sums of money exchanged
between sporting associations, clubs, officials and players, TV and sports
management companies, sponsors, advertisers and governments. Media sports
texts are particularly valuable assets because of their flexibility and inter-
connectedness. A single sports ‘live’ TV broadcast can be shown in ‘real time’
and endlessly afterwards, and can be cut up and packaged in myriad ways, with
its soundtrack separated from its visual images so that both can be continually
manipulated and reproduced. The sports print media, both newspapers and
magazines, can help stimulate interest before the event and ‘keep it alive’ for a
lengthy period afterwards, aided and abetted by the celebrity status of elite
sportspeople. In multi-media environments like the Internet, virtually any
media sports text can be put to use in the virtual world. All manner of goods
and services, from sports equipment and ‘designer’ leisurewear to beer, banking
and tobacco, can invoke or be directly associated with media sports events,
the associated messages adapted as necessary to the cultural sensitivities of
different audience blocs around the globe (Rowe et al. 1994). It is for this reason
that television broadcast rights to the major sports are often contested more
fiercely than the sports events they are seeking to cover – even when those same
media companies complain about how much money they lose by winning them.
To understand this apparently economically irrational behaviour (which per-
haps has turned out to be irrational after all) means delving further into the
media sports cultural complex.

How to make money while losing it in sports television

Having set out the broad economic framework within which contemporary
media sport operates, more precise explanations of why media corporations
are prepared to expend huge sums on securing the rights to television sport are
required. The Olympic Games constitutes a useful example of the economic
appeal of broadcast sport and of the extent to which the rights pertaining to it
are both protected and infringed. Detailing the statistics is not unlike recount-
ing the latest world record time in the 100 metres sprint or the greatest
number of points scored in the World Series, except that (at least until the early