12. Sports, media, and economy.

Beck, Daniel ; Bosshart, Louis

Since the mass media, especially television, create big audiences, they have become interesting partners with sports for economic and political purposes. This development mainly concerns professional sports like football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, tennis, or motor sports, but also major sports events such as the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games can help promote sports that rarely get the attention that the aforementioned professional sports do. And so the history of the modern Olympic games has become a history of Olympic commercialism. Big money is at stake! Selling the television property rights was and still is like having the right to print money. No wonder that members of the Olympic Committee asked for a "fair" share and took bribes. (See, e.g., Lenskyj, 2000; Jennings 1996; Jennings & Sambrook, 2000, about the scandals with IOC members involved.)

Why have sports become big business? Professional athletes participate in more and more intensive training and use more and more sophisticated sports apparatus; so elite sports at these levels become expensive. In addition, the athletes demand high salaries or high prize sums from the organizers of sports events. The organizers pay these sums, since the presence of famous athletes makes their events more attractive--but only if the audience needn't pay much higher entrance fees. That's why there are sponsors who help the organizers finance the event.

Sports sponsors have existed for a long time. In pre-industrial time, noble families not only supported artists, but also sportsmen in order to get a good reputation among the common people. This kind of patronage was replaced by commercial sponsorship in the 19th century. The English food producer "Bovril" sponsored the Nottingham Forest soccer club in 1896, and the French sports journal L'Auto (which later developed into L'Equipe) was the first organizer and main sponsor of the famous "Tour de France" bicycle race, first held in 1903 (Boyle & Haynes, 2000, p. 48). But only with the introduction of television has sports sponsoring become omnipresent. Live transmissions greatly increased the number of people able to read an advertisement in the stadium. So the sponsors were willing to pay the organizers much more money.

At the same time the organizers earned more and more money from media license fees for live transmissions. These programs reached enormously large audiences and achieved high ratings on TV, and so the media could demand extraordinarily high prices for advertising spots before, during, and after a sports event. At least for a while, expensive sports programs could be easily refinanced like this, and everybody took advantage. The advertisers could send their message to a vast audience; the media could produce an attractive program; the organizers earned a lot of money; and the athletes could earn higher salaries or prizes.

In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s organizers, media, and sponsors continually raised the prices of live transmissions. More and more television broadcasters wanted to transmit sports events and therefore willingly paid more than their competitors. This high demand for sports transmissions had several causes. In today's highly segmented media market, big sporting events such as the Olympic Games or the Soccer's World Cup are some of the very rare events which still command a large audience, regardless of class, age, or other interests. Furthermore, language barriers do not matter much in sports, so an event can be transmitted internationally (Gaustad, 2000, pp. 111-112). Finally, for a long time, sports transmissions did not cost very much to produce and were easy to prepare. Later, they mainly became expensive due to the license fees.

Therefore the demand for sports transmissions is high, but they are in short supply. Only a very small number of big sports events generate the really vast audiences. Media companies which don't manage to get the license to transmit a big event, e.g. the Soccer's World Cup, can hardly find competitive alternatives to fill their programming during the event. Furthermore, live transmissions can only be transmitted once, unlike other entertainment programs such as movies. The repetition of a sports game or a race on TV normally doesn't make much sense. The thrill is gone when the audience already knows the result. Therefore, the length of the sports program is extended in order to take full advantage of the expensive exclusive rights. A soccer match on TV does not last the regulation 90 minutes any longer; including additional reports, analyses, and interviews, it could take more than four hours.

But problems can emerge. Exclusive rights can make the prices go up so high that it becomes more and more difficult for television stations to recoup their expenses. A program will lose its attractiveness if it is interrupted by advertising spots too often. Several sports programs on pay TV have proved to be of little success, especially in countries with a wide range of competing free TV channels. And there is also a certain risk of sports programs for media companies. If the most popular athletes have a poor season, TV stations risk losing money. The number of spectators will decrease as they lose interest, and therefore the prices for advertising spots will fall.

Apart from financial problems, commercialism causes other negative consequences for the media. For instance, organizers can dictate the conditions under which media with exclusive rights must to do their job. For example, the International Committee of the Olympic games reserves the right to accredit journalists at the games. Privileges and gifts are included in this deal. Furthermore, several media companies have themselves bought sports clubs or act as sponsors, thus creating privileges for their own broadcast properties or newspapers in reporting certain events. But in this way, the companies can also ensure that media coverage includes no negative news about these events. An interesting consequence is that organizers of sporting events maximize their revenues from the media but make them dependent and vulnerable. In the end, though, journalists lose what is their most important good: independence!

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Daniel Beck and Louis Bosshart

University of Fribourg--Freiburg (Switzerland)

email: daniel.beck@unifr.ch; louis.bosshart@unifr.ch