The new international division of cultural labour and sport

US sport has long been in a speculative analogous to the dot-com era's 'irrational exuberance' 2000) and the asset inflation that followed it. In barely a decade, overbidding for TV rights, fuelled by Rupert Murdoch's dual ambition of creating a global sporting television service while achieving hegemony in its foundational market, has turned broadcast sport from a prized commodity, to a valued loss leader, and finally into a contractual liability As one commentator puts it, during the largest slump in spending on advertising since the Second World War and before the debt-driven crisis five years later, '[t]he US media market is glutted with more sports and entertainment properties than there is ad money to go round' 2002, p. This oversupply led to writedowns in the value of rights to TV sport paid by US media companies in the vicinity of US$3 billion. Such hard-fought deals as NBC's contract for future Olympic Games are financial albatrosses around corporate necks (Chenoweth and O'Riordan, 2002). When rights are up for renegotiation, television's losses are passed onto sports. Competition for shrinking resources between owners, administrators, coaches, elite players and other factions of the sporting industries was not pretty in the early years of this century, and no less so in the post-2007 global financial crisis. There is considerable debate about whether the sporting media are immune to recessions. Premium sports claim that their brand will protect them from reductions in TV rights and sponsorship revenue, while media companies confront balance sheets with reduced advertising and subscription revenue. Murdoch's News Corporation lost US$5.4 billion in 2008-9, partly because of declining advertising revenue for regional cable sports networks and increased marketing and sports rights costs (such as Under these circumstances, smaller sports (including many Olympic and US college sports) and media companies vulnerable to the credit squeeze (like Setanta) are in jeopardy (Sherlock, 2008; Arango, 2009; News Corporation, 2009). The United States is not the only saturated media market seeking audiences through consumerist branding clubs from the English Premier League and Spain's La Liga routinely tour Asia, sell overpriced merchandising made in Asian factories and undermine local football competitions (Rowe and Gilmour, 2008). But the most advanced and desperate manoeuvres are evident in the United States.