The AFC Asian cup : continental competition, global disposition

This chapter assesses the place of the AFC Asian Cup within contemporary mega-mediasport, focusing on the role of the media and event promoters in the representation of the 2015 tournament that took place in the perhaps geopolitically unlikely location of Australia for the first time after 15 previous tournaments in other locations. It explores, in particular, the manner in which the media produce and propose ways of seeing sport events, and the societies that host and participate in them, as part of a wider negotiation of identity and power at a variety of levels and in a range of contexts. Of specific concern is the power of the process of mediatization to draw and redraw symbolic existential boundaries through the treatment of sport. This process should not be confused with the simple (though it is never just that) mass mediation of sports events, because the very act of mediation profoundly affects what is being communicated about and its relationships with other socio-cultural phenomena. As Frandsen (2014, p. 527) notes with regard to the mediatization of sport, the "collaboration between television and sport has resulted in programmes and events where former boundaries between the sports event, the mediated representation of this event and third-party commercial interests have been blurred". In the specific instance of the AFC Asian Cup, the media are integral to the symbolic and material fashioning of a sport event that is global because it involves the "world game" of association football, marked as continental within the framework of FIFA's confederated governmental structure (in one case emphasized later, Australia, spanning continents), and then split into regional blocs and animated by conceptions of nation that are crucial to the logic of an international competitive sports tournament. This is not to argue, of course, that the media create sports events out of thin air; rather, they work with and on the available material for a range of different purposes - social, cultural, political and economic. With regard to the AFC Asian Cup, this communicative work includes what it means to be Asian, and how an event can be made to resonate within and outside the shifting terrain that is nominated as Asia while being projected into the global sphere.