The mediated sport event : neither pure nor simple

It is banal to state today that sport is a business and, indeed, sports economics now claims to be a discipline in its own right given the amount of research and scholarship devoted to it as a response to 'the rapid growth in the economic significance of sport during the past three decades' (Andreff & Szymanski, 2006, p. 5). Important and influential though this work is - the economic value of sport and sport-related economic activity commends itself to systematic, scientific inquiry - from the position of a sociologist and a cultural researcher I would like to highlight aspects of what I call the "media sports cultural complex" (Rowe, 2004) that do not tend to receive close attention within the economics of sport. Much of the work on sport is conducted as if it is an institution and set of practices defined by reasonably clear boundaries that is developing in various ways and is acted upon by other institutions, especially the media, commercial corporations that are not principally involved in sport, and governments. Some stabilisation of what is understood by sport is the necessary underpinning, ironically, for explorations in its deconstruction. The Symposium for which this paper has been developed, for example, is dedicated perfectly legitimately to the changing nature of international sport events, conceiving of three processes - instrumentalisation, digitalisation, trivialisation - as integral to these changes. I would, though, like to ask a prior question: Is the whole field of sport, including but not restricted to the vital area of events, undergoing a profound transformation through its intermeshing with the media? In pursuing this matter, I want to go further than conventional evaluations (often negative) that the media, especially television, have radically changed and even trivialised sport (Rowe, 2007). Instead, an argument is advanced that there is a mutual transformation of sport and media in which the former's influence on the latter should not be under-recognised, and that the consequences of this trend - social, cultural, political and economic - require a rethinking of what we understand by sport and expect of its relationship with media. For this reason, the emphasis in this paper is on sport's influence on television.