Prepare to be a sporting consumer, not just a fan

THE presentation by the BBC of the Sports Personality of the Century award to Muhammad Ali was not only a highly emotional occasion, it also told us much about an age of sport on television which is now passing. In many ways television's presentation of the history of sport is actually a history of televising sport: of key events, individuals and teams.

Ali's overwhelming victory, voted for by BBC viewers, represents this televisual form of collective remembering. Conversely, the winner of the annual BBC sporting award, Lennox Lewis, is the antithesis of Ali as a modern day sporting hero; yes we all know who he is, but who, other than Sky Sports subscribers, has seen him fight? If we all have a picture of the Ali shuffle, what kind of collective image do we have of Lewis?

Lewis's victory also reminds us that new media do not necessarily replace the old. Most people probably gain more information about Lewis - his persona and performance in the ring - from the back pages of newspapers. As fans of sport, we therefore compile our knowledge of sport from parallel sources; if we can't watch it on television, we listen to it on radio. If we can't hear it on radio, we wait for the following day's report in the press; sometimes we do all of these.

So what is changing? Sport, and its relationship with the media, have become key markers of late-20th century popular culture. Throughout the last century, sport has mattered to millions of fans around the world, yet in the last decade or so sport has also increasingly come to matter to those who control and run the media and the wider entertainment industries. Of course there has always been a relationship between sport and various media but the relationship has never been as intense, as sport becomes the content driver for new media delivery systems.

As broadcasting and telecommunications markets have been opened up sport, and football in particular, is viewed as the bridgehead which will allow new delivery systems and companies to establish the patterns of market domination required to make them profitable.

Two crucial developments, which are likely to significantly add to this complex picture, are the internet, and digital and pay-per-view broadcasting.

Despite the various figures which are often given for the potential growth in this market, the amount of money that pay-per- view will generate for both broadcasters and the powerful clubs remains uncertain. However, media companies are trying to cover all the angles.

The interest taken by media companies such as Scottish Media Group, BSkyB and cable giant NTL in football clubs demonstrates how these companies look at sports organisations, not as partners, but as integral units of their business strategies.

This jockeying for position will continue as long as sport offers a "product" that can be transformed into a valuable commercial entity delivering readers, viewers, advertisers, customers and subscribers.

While these developments are new to UK sports business, they have their precedents on the European continent, and North America. Canal Plus, the giant French media company, owns the successful French team Paris Saint-Germain and Disney, Time Warner and Fox all have several sporting links with various clubs across the United States.

The competition for sports also extends to radio. One of the success stories for BBC Scotland Sport has been the rejuvenation of its radio sports output (although in reality this actually means football). Ironically it almost marks a return to a time when BBC Sport actually meant radio sport, as opposed to television coverage, as that part of the organisation's portfolio continues to decline.

Yet while the technology is innovative many of these new avenues of engagement with our sporting heroes remain firmly embedded in the interests of big business. Only recently, Microsoft's Paul Allen joined Italian media sports entrepreneur and politician Silvio Berlusconi as a shareholder in the internet sports website company, Sportal.

In the UK, the BBC has also pioneered the convergence of traditional broadcast media and the internet to produce new ways to consume sport, the Radio Five Live football commentary on the Web of the Old Firm match in May 1999 being one notable success. Yet the main players in the economic and political success of sport on the internet remain those with global corporate interests.

Yet sport is too important to be left solely to the media moguls. It also offers a rich arena of myth, image, narrative and a compulsive world of story-telling. At a cultural level the images that a community project on to the sporting field, and the manner in which that image gets refracted through various media, tells us much about our individual and collective identities (think Scotland and Argentina 1978, or the 1990 Murrayfield rugby Grand Slam). It also exposes in a very public manner our values, priorities, hopes, dreams and aspirations.

National governments and to an extent the EU are aware of the cultural, and by association political, importance of sport. However they also see the cultural industries as increasingly key drivers in the economy, and as a source of employment and wealth creation. It is that balancing act between commerce and culture that sports have to confront as they become ever more closely identified with the media.

We would suggest that throughout the century sport's relationship with the media has been one of mutual benefit. The broadcast media in particular have helped create truly national and international sporting events, and in the process given democratic access to millions of people, consumers and citizens.

However it appears, unlike the century that has passed, we are entering an era that will be based on exclusivity rather than universal access. We now have a media landscape that while dominated by the rhetoric of extending viewer choice, none the less addresses us not as citizens, but rather as consumers of new - and not so new - services.

It is hard to imagine a sportsman dominating our popular collective memory to the extent that Ali has done. This is not simply because the individual greatness of someone like Ali (for both sporting and non-sports fans) only emerges sporadically from the sporting and political culture. But also because how we experience and think about sport is likely to change this century and become more individually tailored to specific sporting audiences.

We are now told that we are moving into a new era of media consumption, one where we are not only at ringside in widescreen and surround sound, but also digitally enabled to interact with the event itself (question: how many e-mails can a boxer send in between each round?).

Yet something of that collective experience, which makes key sporting moments carry a wider cultural significance may be lost.

Those of us who prefer our sport to exist on a large epic playing field may be reduced to drawing the curtains and downloading footage of Ali, the 1970 Brazil team and McEnroe and Borg from the extensive archives of 20th century life which will no doubt be available to us - at a price.

Raymond Boyle and Richard Haynes are members of the Stirling Media Research Institute at Stirling University and authors of Power Play: Sport, the Media and Popular Culture (Longman: 2000) e-mail: [email protected] web:

http://www-fms.stir.ac.uk/ staff_sites/raymond_boyle/ index.html

Copyright 2000
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