Football in the New Media Age

Raymond Boyle, Richard Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134369287
• Subtopic: Media Studies

Football in the New Media Age analyzes the impact of media change on the football industry, drawing on extensive interviews with key people in the media and football industry. It examines the finances of the game; the rising importance of rights and rights management in the industry; and attempts by clubs to develop their own media capacity. At the core of the book is an examination of the battle for control of the game as media, business and fans all seek to redefine the sport in the twenty-first century.

Football is rarely out of the headlines, with stories about star players misbehaving, clubs facing financial meltdown, or TV companies battling over broadcast rights dominating much of the mainstream news and current affairs agenda.The impact of the vast amounts of money paid to elite footballers, and the inability of young men to cope with this when combined with their media-fuelled celebrity status, have frequently made headlines.

At the core of this process is the battle to control a game that has exploited its position as a key 'content provider' for new media over the last decade, and this book provides the examiniation and analysis to study this problem.

Chapter 1
Football and television

Game on?

Anyone who still wondered whether football was a sport or a business should wonder no more. The vast majority of these men (and women) do their work, not in the crowded penalty-box, or the close quarters conflict of the midfield, but in boardrooms and corridors, on the mobile telephone or via the small screen. They are the administrators, lobbyists, club chairman and directors who run the game, the agents and broadcasters who live off it, and the politicians, policemen and bankers with the power to make telling interventions from outside. It is not a list to stir the soul.

Journalist Glenn Moore, introducing the 50 most influential people in British football. The Independent, 13 January 2003

Here [Britain] it’s football first, second and third.

David Hill, BSkyB’s then Head of Sport, 1992

Introduction

Today it is difficult to imagine football without television or a television schedule bereft of football. As a result over the last decade or so academic writing about sport and football in particular has mushroomed. What we want to do in the first section of this chapter is outline some of the previous writing on the relationship between the football industry and the media. In particular we focus on that work which has traced the impact that television has had on the structure and financing of the sport in the UK. In the following section, we analyse the key milestones which characterise the relationship between television and football over the last few years. We argue that it is impossible to understand football in the new media age, without reference to the more general history of the sport in the television age. As we suggested in the Introduction, the new media environment is in many ways the latest staging post in a longer history of media evolution, which sees both continuity and change in its interaction with aspects of wider popular cultural activity. Thus in many ways this chapter sets the broader historical context within which the rest of the book is placed.

Approaches to the relationship between football and television

Television and football: economic issues and concerns

Concerns about the impact of the economic restructuring of the game and issues about its governance have become an area of growing concern during the last decade (Fynn and Guest, 1994, 1999; Conn, 1998; Conn et al., 2003; Dempsey and Reilly, 1998; Morrow, 1999, 2003; Hamil et al., 1999, 2000; Banks, 2002; Bower, 2003a). The increasing influence that television has exercised over the sport and the unhealthy degree to which clubs have become dependent on television income have meant that the economic aspects of the game have become of considerable interest to those coming from a more financial and or legal background (Morrow, 1999, 2003; Greenfield and Osborn, 2001).

An important aspect of this approach has been to focus in varying degrees on the relationship between football clubs and television in particular. Significantly many of these writers, while drawing on academic disciplines such as economics and law are often keen to highlight the unique cultural dimension that accompanies football, particularly, but not exclusively in the UK.

Stephen Morrow (1999: 13) notes how framing discussions between football and television in purely economic terms only offers a partial picture. He argues:

In particular insufficient consideration is given to the peculiarities of the product [football] in economic terms. In these terms the customer concept is incomplete because it fails to consider the role played by supporters in creating the product they are asked to buy, i.e. the atmosphere. In other words football needs supporters not just as customers but because they form part of a unique joint product.

Thus while the economic aspects of the evolution of the football industry are important, so too is understanding that here is a business often heavily laden with cultural value, and political symbolism.

What many of these authors (Conn, 1998; Hamil et al., 1999) demonstrate is the extent to which the language of the market and business has permeated football culture. This has happened in a relatively short period of time, and while vestiges of the football as business discourse can be traced back to the 1980s and clubs such as Tottenham Hotspur and their flotation on the stock market, by comparison with the 1990s, these were peripheral in the wider structure of the game. What could be argued is that football as an industry and business simply adopted many of the established commercial and market driven aspects of other areas of both public life and popular culture in Britain, a decade or so after most of these areas had been colonised by market forces. To put it simply, these commercial forces, with one or two exceptions, were simply not interested in football, which the Sunday Times (18 June 1985) in an infamous editorial in the 1980s could call ‘a slum sport watched by slum people’.

However the powerful combination of forced governmental change, driven by the Taylor Report (1990), a cultural shift in the image of the national game in England facilitated by the relative success of that country at the Italia 90 World Cup, and the massive financial and marketing boost given to the game by money from BSkyB in 1992, all combined to open up the football industry to the commercial forces which had paid little attention to football in the previous decade. As David Conn has argued by the early 1990s:

A new breed of financial adviser arrived – accountants, brokers, lawyers – schooled in the nihilism of market forces, looking at football in the most superficial ways. Football, according to the City, is an ‘entertainment product’, the clubs are ‘brands’.

Conn, 1998: 154

Economists such as Dobson and Goddard (2001: 423) argue that what they call ‘the competitive imbalance’ in the English game – and indeed the contemporary football industry more generally – is a result of the unleashing of market forces on the game, which in turn is closely allied with its changing relationship with television which we discuss later in the chapter.

Central to this area of research are the twin concerns about the distorting impact that the flow of television money is having on the game, specifically the more traditional aspects of the sport and the apparent lack of governance of a sport which increasingly appears to treat its supporters with disdain. Many of these writers (Hamil et al., 1998, 2000; Bower, 2003a) highlight an inability for the structures of the sport to adequately deal with its new found wealth – centred on the elite end of the game – and balance this with the wider aspects of social responsibility that come from running a major cultural activity. One which forms part of a wider network of activities and constitutes an important component of various collective identity formation processes. As the economist and writer Will Hutton has argued:

What football demonstrates more eloquently than any economic tract is how feeble are the self regulating tendencies of capitalist markets, of how easy it is for industries to succumb to perverse and self destructive incentives and of the necessity for external intervention by way of regulation and rules to make good those endemic shortcomings.

The Observer, 16 March 2003

Thus concerns about the impact of massive television revenues on aspects of the footballing economy raise wider issues about control which go beyond the confines of this particular industry and find echoes across the wider economy.

It is not just in this area that economists and lawyers have raised concerns. One of the characteristics of the new media age has been a growing concern with the issue of intellectual property (IP) and image rights in general.

Media rights and competition law

The growth of media involvement in football has also spawned an increasing interest in the role that the law and wider regulatory frameworks play in the sport. Some of this has been clearly driven by the wider encroachment of issues of law and regulation within the field of the media industries themselves. We would argue that the relocating of elite football within the wider entertainment and cultural industries has also resulted in issues of rights and their regulation, often more closely associated with areas such as the music and the film industries, becoming increasingly part of the culture which surrounds elite football performers. We look at this in particular detail in Chapters 4 and 5.

More generally however, football as a business has found itself becoming immersed in the wider arena of law and regulation. For an industry which has spent most of its history apparently immune from such practices and has obstinately self-regulated its activity, this has been something of a culture shock (Morrow, 1999, 2003; Hamil et al., 1999; Bower, 2003a). The structural shift in club ownership patterns that has occurred as many clubs have become public limited companies (plcs), has meant that they have become subject to a new regulatory framework. Although many commentators as noted above feel that this level of intervention has not been sufficient to eradicate a culture of complacency among those who govern the game. As a result of this shift to plc status many clubs have found themselves having to manage a range of publics which extend beyond their traditional fan base, resulting in clubs engaging – to various degrees – with aspects of a growing sports public relations culture (Boyle et al., 2002).

Of significant interest in this particular area is the work of Greenfield and Osborn (2001) who place their analysis of the regulatory framework that has shaped the game within the wider context of the regulation of aspects of popular cultural activity. In their book they suggest that, ‘The defining moments in the recent history of the game have concerned legal involvement’ (Greenfield and Osborn, 2001: 198). Without doubt, the Taylor Report into the 1989 Hillsborough disaster which ushered in a new era of all seater stadia played a key role in helping to renew a game which if left in its pre-Taylor state would not have been nearly as enticing a ‘product’ for BSkyB in the early 1990s.

Central to this approach is an understanding of the ‘different aspects of regulation [that] have evolved to confront the new challenges that the increasing economisation of football has thrown up’ (Greenfield and Osborn, 2001: 195). They argue that at the core of these changes is a broad agenda that is driven by the media as it increasingly impacts on footballing culture. Significantly they also suggest that this new footballing paradigm in which television in particular takes centre stage has resulted in the concept of the ‘fan’ itself becoming an increasingly problematic concept.

It is increasingly difficult to describe who, or what, a fan actually is. Traditionally this was far clearer in an age when someone turned up, rain or shine, to support his (usually his) team and regarded those who turned up only sporadically as ‘fairweather’. Now supporters have become consumers, and the way in which football can be consumed and, therefore, how a team can be supported has changed.

Greenfield and Osborn, 2001: 197

While we find this analysis helpful, we would also caution against the abandonment of more traditional notions of fandom. As we argue in later chapters we suggest that while aspects of the new media environment have re-shaped part of the landscape of football fandom (and indeed made it a more complex terrain to map out) it has not eradicated some of the core characteristics of fan culture. That is of course not to say that the new ‘entertainment’ paradigm in which football finds itself has not helped to create a new relationship with a generation of consumers who have grown up with football in its current highly mediated form (see Chapter 7).

Media systems and globalisation

One of the growing areas of interest in sport more generally as a cultural form among those from both a media studies and sociologically informed background is the issue of the impact of globalisation on the game. At its core, is an assumption that various forms of communication are playing a key role in restructuring and compressing space and time with regard in particular to cultural form and practice. In turn, these raise a range of issues around identity formation, commercialisation and the governance of the game. Of course these processes form part of a wider political and economic network which is impacting on a number of institutions and cultural forms of which sport, and more specifically football is just one (Maguire, 1999; Miller et al., 2001; Williams, 2002a).

Some scholars concerned by the evolution of a more globally oriented cultural and entertainment industry offer a pessimistic outlook with regard to the impact that the political economy of these media sectors are having on sport as a cultural entity. Law et al. (2002) map out the extent to which sport has become embedded in the corporate networks of major entertainment institutions. These organisations simply view sport as a form of product, which can generate income across a range of platforms and a variety of distribution chains. The future their analysis outlines is one in which private, commercially driven and global media corporations control the flow of top level sport available to the fan. In so doing these corporations eradicate the last vestiges of national/ cultural regulation which seeks to position sport as something other than purely ‘media product’.

While clearly elements of their analysis shed light on the extent to which sections of sport appear to have been annexed by corporate media culture, the situation on the ground remains complex and at times contradictory. As Miller et al. argue:

Sport is increasingly shaped by the media, spectacularized by commerce, employed to deliver audiences to sponsors, and intimately linked to the technological opportunities afforded by various media delivery forms (satellite, cable, webcast, microwave) but not in a manner that ignores dissent and resistance. As such, globalizing tendencies must always be viewed as mediated by local structures, including the nation-state.

Miller et al., 2001: 24

For example in the UK, legislation does exist which protects aspects of sporting culture for free-to-air television (Boyle and Haynes, 2000: 216), the relative strength of PSB in this country (although under varying levels of political attack) also acts as a check on the unbridled commercialisation of the British broadcasting market. In the case of football, an emphasis is placed on the rights holders, as custodians of the game to strike a balance between selling the sport to television and retaining something of the intrinsic value of that sport as a significant cultural entity. Certainly in the Scottish and English cases, a failure to recognise the social and cultural value of the game will ultimately lead to the sport’s long-term demise as a mass spectator sport in these particular markets. There is also the issue of resistance among supporters and shareholders to the supposedly inexorable commodification of the sport by media interests. Again in the UK, the most high profile example of this in recent years was the successful lobbying which led to the blocking of the proposed takeover of one of the world’s largest football clubs, Manchester United, by one of the most successful pay television operations, BSkyB. Significantly it was the ‘public interest’ aspect of the takeover which was given as one of the key reasons for stopping the takeover (Walsh and Brown, 1999; Greenfield and Osborn, 2001: 54–63).

Also central in any investigation into the impact of globalisation on the football industry is the extent that we appear to be shifting from a paradigm of broadcasting which primarily has been organised and regulated within national boundaries (accepting that there was always signal overspill), to a more diverse and complex communications system, where the national now operates cheek by jowl with the global. In the development of new media digital technologies and their uneven integration into existing structures, and in particular a distribution network (the Internet) which is potentially global, a new set of dynamics between traditional broadcasters (some of whom are attempting to transform themselves into global players), commercial communication organisations (both local, but increasingly global) and content providers (such as bodies like UEFA, the FA Premier League and individual clubs) is being played out. Even public service broadcasters who are operating within previously clearly defined internal national markets and cultural spaces within broader political states find themselves readjusting to accommodate shifting patterns of technology and audience expectations.

So a broadcaster such as the BBC in the UK can make a decision in 2003 to migrate its services from an encrypted digital satellite platform (BSkyB) to an ‘in the clear’ service which will enable digital viewers across the UK to access national/regional programming, such as news and current affairs, previously only available within clearly demarcated national/regional communicative spaces. Thus someone in London now wishing to watch BBC Scotland’s national news broadcasts can do so. Significantly, the only area which appeared to prove in any way problematic was the requirement that the BBC re-negotiate its contract with the Scottish Premier League (SPL) for live rights to Scottish football, given that these now would be beamed across the UK, freely available to digital viewers outside of Scotland. However, as the BBC presses ahead with its digital agenda it seems largely indifferent to the impact its expanded services have for rights holders.

We would concur with Williams when he argues:

This is not simply a picture of a dominant global sports culture flowing in a single direction to uncritical sports consumers. It is one, instead, in which sporting tastes, attitudes and values are regularly destabilised and reconfigured as key media interests, and corporate actors remake relationships through sport at local, national and global levels.

Williams, 2002a: 73

Thus one of our concerns is tracking aspects of this process across both the UK and wider European arena as it relates in particular to the football industry and the evolving traditional and new media sectors of the economy.

Another central concern in this book is the impact, in a range of economic, institutional and cultural spheres that evolving media technologies are having on cultural forms such as football. For instance, the development of digital television and the growth of the Internet, combined with the liberalisation of the broadcasting and telecommunications markets, both in the UK and across Europe raise a range of issues addressed throughout the book. The impact of a growing synergy between media corporations and football clubs is examined in the following chapters, focusing both on the UK and then the rest of Europe (Chapters 2 and 3). Allied with this concern is an interest in the extent to which elite football clubs have been developing new media strategies which reflect a growing awareness of the global business opportunities offered by evolving communication systems, and are symptomatic of a growing process of commercialisation within mainstream popular culture. Of particular interest here is the tensions that exist between the local and the global as football clubs attempt to re-position themselves in an environment where the elite of the sport operate as commercial institutions seeking to maximise the value they can extract from a range of media rights they now see themselves holding (Chapter 5).

We argue throughout the book that football offers us an insight into how this process is evolving, and highlights some of the wider cultural and political shifts that are taking place within the terrain of popular culture. It illustrates tensions between the local, na...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Football and television
• Chapter 2: The digital revolution
• Chapter 3: The European dimension
• Chapter 4: Commercialising celebrity
• Chapter 5: Battle for control
• Chapter 6: A league of their own?
• Chapter 7: The new World Wide Web of football
• Conclusion: the only game?
• Notes
• Bibliography