Sport Communication

An International Approach

Chuka Onwumechili

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351983525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Sport is a global business. Now more than ever, sport communication professionals need to understand sport's global reach in order to develop their full potential. This is the first textbook to introduce the fundamental principles and practice of sport communication from an international perspective. Combining business strategies with insights into social issues such as gender, disability and national identity, this is an accessible, practical and engaging guide to the essentials of sport communication.

Aimed to enhance learning at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, each chapter contains special features tailored to meet the needs of students and instructors. These include learning objectives, chapter summaries, activities, reflections, discussion questions, recommended resource lists and original cross-cultural case studies that demonstrate sport communication theories put into practice. Its twenty chapters explore communication in sport across all levels, from interpersonal communication and team building to strategic communications, and in all forms of media, from print and broadcast to social media.

Sport Communication: An International Approach is an essential text for any course on sport communication, sport business or sport management.

Chapter 1

Studying communication and sport

Learning objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Understand the meaning of sport and be able to differentiate it from game.
• Understand the meaning of communication and various types and levels of communication.
• Understand the relationship between communication and sport.
• Appreciate the meaning of an international approach to communication and sport.
• Understand how different cultures impact communication and sport.
• Become aware of and appreciate reasons for the study of communication and sport from an international perspective.

Sport has become big business in recent times. Figures show that global sport generated $145.34 billion in 2015 (Statista.com). It has become an activity that affects the lives of so many people, whether they are in Bangkok, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Kingston, or Yaounde. People may be directly involved by playing a sport or having a family member who plays a sport. However, the most prevalent way in which most people become involved in sport is through communication media. A good example of this occurred in 2010, when an estimated 3.2 billion people watched at least one minute of the 2010 World Cup. This is an amazing number when one considers that the estimated population of the world was 6.9 billion at the time. In essence, one of every two persons in the world, at the time, watched the World Cup! It is difficult to imagine another event that attracts that type of attention across the world. This chapter focuses on sport and communication and how those two intersect from an international perspective. It further makes a case for studying sport communication and discusses several career options in the field.

Understanding sport

In certain parts of the world, sports is used instead of sport. However, throughout this text sport refers to a single kind of sport and sports is used to refer to multiple kinds of sport. While we often recognize what a sport means, we often use the word interchangeably with the word game. However, there is a difference between those two activities. Game is a rule-bound activity for entertainment, recreation, or amusement purposes. These rules are often unnatural and are created specifically for the conduct of a particular game. For instance, games include boxing, card playing, party games, lawn tennis, hide and seek, Jeopardy on American television, or the Raid the Cage game shown on Israeli television. A game requires the use of a person’s intellectual capacity.

Generally, sport is a type of game that involves physical exertion and skill and is usually undertaken for competition. For instance, lawn tennis is a sport but card playing is not; boxing is but Raid the Cage is not. Those who participate in sport are known as athletes because they are physically able and skilled to participate in a particular sport. Participating in a non-sport game does not require one to be an athlete. Thus, while a game is not necessarily a sport, a sport is always a game.

Photo 1.1 An athletic stadium, which could host sport events communicated to the rest of the world.

Source: Dreamstime.com, reprinted with permission

Furthermore, it is important to realize other ways in which the word game may be used. For instance, a game may refer to a specific sport contest. A lacrosse game may refer to a single lacrosse contest that involves two teams. It is from this perspective that one should view the concept Olympic Games, which refers to several sport games that take place during a particular Olympics.

Communication

Communication is defined in several ways. Some of the definitions are quite broad and others are narrow. One of the broadest definitions of communication is the definition by Osmo Antero Wiio (2009) that one cannot NOT communicate. Wiio, a Finnish professor, outlined what can be described as four laws of human communication, particularly at the interpersonal level. One of those laws is that we cannot not communicate, which means that whether we intend to or not, there is always communication. In essence, communication occurs just by our mere presence. This is an overly broad way of describing communication that does not leave us a way to discriminate between what is and what is not communication.

Weaver and Shannon (1963) provide us with a model from which to define communication. This definition is much more narrow and discriminatory than Wiio’s idea of communication. The model provides a visual outline of communication between a sender and receiver and constitutes key concepts such as message, disruptive noise, and feedback. It shows us that communication takes place when both the sender and receiver have a shared understanding or meaning of the message that is designed to produce a certain effect. The process of reaching this shared meaning or understanding is the communication process.

There are various contexts for communication that include intrapersonal, interpersonal, small group, organizational, mass, and multidimensional. As we shall learn, in communication and sport, each of these contexts matter. For instance, intrapersonal communication takes place when an athlete or a fan communicates with the self about a sport activity. A male, for instance, may self-identify as a field hockey fan in Germany by watching the triumph of German male teams in field hockey competitions at various Olympics. This individual may adopt the sport and build his game in the mold of Florian Fuch, who is a field hockey star in Germany. Interpersonal communication may take place during interaction between a female volleyball player and her coach. This type of communication takes place between two people. Small group communication usually involves at least three persons and as many as 20 persons who work as a group. In such groups, communication may be both relational and task-focused. Most sport teams work within the context of small group communication. These contexts may involve tactical discussions or team training for an upcoming game. Organizational communication refers to communication that takes place in an organizational context. These types of communication can be either formal or informal and are used to inform, persuade, and promote goodwill among members as well as the organization’s publics. Sport organizations may consist of large teams (including backroom staff and administration), associations, and institutions organized in hierarchical structures that work towards a shared goal. Mass communication refers to delivering messages through a mass medium to a large number of persons who are widely dispersed. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and Internet platforms can each serve as a mass medium for delivery of such messages. Major sporting events like the Olympics, Wimbledon Tennis Championships, and the Rugby World Cup are brought to a large audience through mass media. Multidimensional communication may be delivered through a platform that allows various contexts of communication to take place. These contexts of communication could include interpersonal, small group, organizational, and mass communication. All of those contexts are delivered via the same platform. This frequently occurs via an Internet or Web platform termed social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. Such media environments allow both interaction with a large number of people at the same time or a dyadic (i.e. two-person) interaction.

Communication and sport: an international approach

We have already defined both sport and communication. This book is concerned with how those two concepts interact (i.e. how does communication take place in sport and about sport). We already should get the idea that human interaction always is centered on communication. It is impossible to have interaction without communication. Sport involves a significant amount of human interaction and, thus, communication is a central aspect of sport. It does not matter whether that sporting moment is one in which a coach is deeply thinking (intrapersonal) about what tactical maneuver she should apply to ensure her team’s victory in a badminton contest or a star athlete is tweeting about her opponent’s roughhouse tackles during a soccer game. Each of those events constitutes sport communication, which is part of this book’s focus.

Importantly, the approach of this text is to study communication and sport from an international perspective. You are probably wondering what this means. It means that this textbook is focused on the intersection of communication and sport in multiple countries. Thus, instead of solely focusing on studying communication and sport in the United States, France, or Britain, the focus is on communication and sport in various countries of the world with examples on various types of sport, communication contexts, and countries such as India, Germany, France, Britain, Nigeria, Brazil, and so on.

An international approach recognizes that cultures differ from region to region, country to country, and even within countries. These differences ultimately affect communication and sport. Culture refers to shared beliefs, values, and norms among a defined group of people. For instance, one culture may differ from another because one believes that the life process is a cycle that includes birth, living, death, and re-birth (reincarnation), while another believes that the life process is linear and involves birth, living, and death. Values may differ as well. The United States, for example, values individual effort and achievement, whereas in China the group or collective effort and achievement is considered more valuable. Norms or practices may also differ. In the United States, males and females sit together as spectators to watch sport, whereas in some Muslim countries, women cannot participate in a mixed sporting environment. Essentially, culture is a fundamental aspect of the identity of athletes and sporting audiences in different parts of the world and, therefore, studying the communication of sport from an international approach has to consider culture and its deep impact.

Reflection

Plan a one-day journal on sport communication. On that day, record all that you encounter which you believe should be considered sport communication. Then examine the data. How many times do you watch sport communicated over a medium such as on television, radio, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, among others? Also, how many times did your friends bring it up in a day, and what did they talk about? How many of your encounters would you label international sport communication? Why? Think about the definition of the jobs held by those who bring to you information on sport. Reflect on all of that.

Why study communication and sport?

The communication of sport for the benefit of a mass audience goes back a few centuries to the 1790s when the first sport magazines appeared in Britain (McChesney, 1989). That idea was later to spread to other parts of the world, including the United States, where the first mass communication of sport also occurred through magazines such as Spirit of the Times in the 1820s. Today, sport is communicated to the public through various mass media platforms. Sport is widely consumed and is regarded as essential in today’s world. However, that was not always the case. Initially, sport was considered vulgar and frowned upon by societies that defined “proper” behavior as respect for each other, friendliness, cordiality, and civility. Thus, public competition involving a sport like boxing was widely frowned upon, at least publicly, and seen as an example of social decadence that was only practiced by the rough dregs of society. No respectable publication was expected to indulge in reporting such events and behavior.

McChesney (1989) points out that early reports of sport in magazines were by writers who used pseudonyms to protect their identity. Such writers did not want to be publicly associated with participating in events that were considered decadent. They also chose the sport they covered with extreme care. Thus, the early focus was on horse racing and not human contests. It was much later that sport magazines began to cover cricket and boxing after they realized that increasing numbers of persons were purchasing and consuming sport magazines. McChesney points out that Spirit of the Times reached a circulation of 100,000 by the 1850s.

Of course, with comfort in the knowledge that the public liked sporting contests, the first full-fledged sport reporters began to emerge, and they began to use their real names in sport reports. Among the first was Henry Chadwick of the New York Clipper (Stevens, 1987) in the 1850s, who went ahead to popularize baseball in America. Newspapers and other mass media followed by dedicating space and time to sport coverage.

The study of sport communication as an academic field could be said to have taken the same trajectory. The study of sport communication was initially considered unserious and recreational and did not become accepted until the last few decades when academic degrees began to be awarded in the field and several academic journals began to emerge.

There are several reasons for studying communication and sport. These reasons stem from personal interest, the rise in the importance of sport, understanding human behavior, learning about emerging research in the field, understanding how culture intersects with sport communication, the fact that sporting events have become mega global events, and learning about careers in the field. We elaborate on each of those reasons in subsequent paragraphs.

People have personal interest in sport for various reasons and, thus, it may attract them to study sport or to read about it. Sport obviously provides entertainment in our lives and serves as a discussion topic for social engagement. For instance, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup generates conversation at home, among friends in school, and at the workplace. Sport also provides us with an element of danger that we crave. As spectators, we know we will not die from it, but we pray and are supremely engaged during competition as we will our team to win. A positive result brings to us a high state of excitement and joy while defeat creates sadness and grief for us. Human nature is essentially competitive, and we want to come out successful in things that we participate in. That nature and primal urge pushes us to seek victory. As spectators, we seek vicariously to win by urging our team on. These interests often lead some of us to develop an interest in studying sport communication.

Moreover, the importance of sport in our world has been increasing for years. The spectatorship has risen tremendously, particularly among those who watch the game via a mass medium. Statista.com projected that 350 million people watched the 2014 World Cup that took place in Brazil; 170 million people watched the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League Final of 2014; 140 million watched the Winter Olympics opening ceremony; and 125 million people watched the American Super Bowl. In the most populated country in the world, China, close to 70% of television viewers watched the 2012 Olympics! (Watanabe, Nie, & Yan, 2013). But beyond the large numbers of spectatorship, revenues have also risen widely across the world. Several mass media companies pay millions of dollars to secure rights to broadcast sporting events, and other companies pay hugely to sponsor sport leagues or become associated with them. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) projected a close to $35 billion global sport media rights market for...