Reflections on Communication and Sport

Test of Significance

Sport contests take place at particular times in specific places, usually in a stadium setting. Of the 7 billion or so potential participants and spectators across the globe, not many more than 100,000 could feasibly be copresent at that stadium. Therefore, without the machinery of mass communication and media to “transport” it, the vast edifice of contemporary sport would be a set of largely localized, segmented activities. Progressively under modernity, print media could discuss and interpret sport for the benefit of those who were far distant; electronic media brought the sights and sounds of the unique event to them in real time, and much else besides; and now online media enable people all over the world to communicate with each other about sport.

Communication and sport are, then, demonstrably indissoluble. But of what consequence is their connection? We could enlist the power of numbers, such as estimations that almost 900 million people watched at least some of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, or that almost 910 million did the same for the 2010 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup Final (Associated Press, 2012a). It would be foolish to ignore any phenomenon that could attract almost a seventh of the world’s population, if only fleetingly, to engage in the same activity at the same time. The communication–sport coupling is especially notable for those with an economic interest in matching sport to audiences, meaning that the striking numbers for viewers are paralleled by the dollar value of media rights that, along with income from sponsors, nation-states, ticket sales, and merchandising, provides the financial underpinning of what I call the “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, 2004). So, for example, the massive viewership for the Olympics explains the media corporation NBC’s expenditure of just under U.S.$10 billion on U.S. media rights to the Summer and Winter Olympics between 2000 and 2020 (Associated Press, 2012b); the value of the National Football League’s (NFL’s) media rights renewals with NBC, CBS, and Fox in December 2011, estimated at U.S.$3.2 billion per year until 2022 (Crupi, 2011); and the 3-year media rights for the English Premier League (EPL) contracted in 2012 for an estimated minimum of U.S.$7.8 billion (SportsBusiness Daily, 2012).

As impressive as these statistics may be, they are, in fact, signs of why communication and sport matter, not primary reasons in themselves. Although there is no doubt that institutional media and, increasingly, social media can stimulate interest in sport as measured by aggregate viewing numbers and fan dialogue, without sport’s fundamental popular cultural appeal there would be little of note to represent and to discuss. Communication works on and with sport to make its localized, spatially dependent pleasures widely, even indiscriminately, available for the collective gaze. Of key significance, then, is what happens to sport when it is communicated extensively, and, especially, the meanings and uses of mediated sport. This is because, as Lawrence Wenner (2007) has consistently argued, sport communication can never be contained as a “pure,” insulated practice and representation of physical play. It is always the bearer of sociocultural meaning, perpetually a vehicle for “dirt” in the sense that, as metaphorical “matter out of place,” it is readily sprinkled around and attaches itself to a range of extrasporting phenomena.

Thus, for example, the sportsperson who engages in international competition immediately invokes discourses of nation and of sport’s role as a signifier of national identity. But that “person” is almost inevitably marked as male or female, which means that gender qualities and relations in sport and society are brought to the fore. Questions of gender in turn connote matters of sex and sexuality, and by this process invoke an expanding range of sociocultural categories, attributes, and meanings relating to social class, “race,” ethnicity, age, ability/disability, and so forth. In other words, the communication–sport nexus matters because whenever sport is brought into wider sociocultural spaces, it throws light on how those spaces are constructed and operate, while at the same time is itself a factor in their construction and operation. It is especially instructive concerning how the media influence what they are representing (in this case sport) through the very act of representing it (so-called mediatization) and also how groups of sport practitioners and followers may mobilize to resist prevailing modes of media representation. In summary, communication and sport matter because of this combination’s intrinsic importance as a focus of sociocultural organization, activity, identity, and affect as well as of capital accumulation. Mediated sport is thereby carried into virtually every other sociocultural domain, making it almost literally unavoidable and so “unignorable.” Understanding something of the dynamics of communication and sport is, therefore, an essential capability for anyone who wishes to function as an engaged, knowledgeable citizen of a sport-saturated world that they may not have made but must nonetheless inhabit.

Voyage of Discovery

There are many roads taken in scholarly life and, regarding communication and sport, my travels have been along a meandering country lane rather than a speedy point-to-point, multilane autobahn. Like many baby boom boys growing up in England, I was socialized into sport as prevailing masculine identity, with my father taking primary responsibility for teaching me fundamental athletic skills and sporting rules. Sport and physical education at school conferred legitimacy on organized, competitive physical culture, with informal sport games an essential part of everyday childhood leisure. I became a moderately useful all-round sports boy without ever threatening, to my eternal disappointment, to register a winning goal for England at Wembley, try at Twickenham, or boundary at Lord’s. In making a strong connection between national identity and sport, I was highly dependent on the media, especially public service media via the British Broadcasting Corporation (radio, in the first instance) and the press (initially the middle market tabloid, the preferred daily reading matter of the respectable working class). My family was not among the early adopters of television within the English upper proletariat, but we had acquired this key domestic communication technology by the time England won the 1966 World Cup of association football. Over the ensuing years, the sport–media embrace became ever more intimate, and color television gave an unprecedented sense of “being there” when far away. But my personal interest in sport—and so media sport consumption—waned to an extent because sport had become a little “uncool” in comparison with another form of popular culture that was then reaching its zenith—rock music (Rowe, 1995).

The interweaving of sport, education, masculinity, and nation that had made it so affectively potent in earlier times became something of a liability. Rock music, especially during the obstreperous intervention of punk and when the “indie scene” was at its height, seemed to offer a much freer, less rule-bound form of popular culture with more apparent potential for political progressivism. But sport was not discarded among my cultural interests and commitments. Paradoxically, as the sports media became increasingly sophisticated and conspicuous, my most enduring, topophiliac sporting attachments became stronger after I exchanged hemispheres. This move accentuated hyperlocal loyalty toward my undistinguished hometown association football club, and patriotic support for England sport teams in the face of pro-Australia supportership, the most aggressive anti-England sporting nationalism I had encountered outside Scotland. As a migrant half a world away from sporting “home base,” I became more media-dependent than ever before, and more attuned to the variations in the media coverage of sport across nations.

Similarities and differences between sport and rock music as popular culture (questions of capital, nation, gender, “race” and so on in their various permutations) were discerned and, almost accidentally, I took on sport as an object of research and scholarship. As a sociologist of culture influenced by interdisciplinary cultural and media studies whose teaching responsibility was mostly in communication studies, I had little option (though needing little encouragement) other than to concentrate on the communication-related aspects of sport. It quickly became clear that there was a considerable intellectual hunger among students, scholars, and, intriguingly, journalists for this critically reflective work on the social institution of sport, its contribution to contemporary culture, and relationship with the media. In particular, what the media were doing with sport in ideological terms was constantly at issue, such as the persistent use of sports metaphors in business and political reporting, and the strategic deployment of sport in media commentary and advertising to define and divide (vertically and horizontally) men and women. To return to my introductory comments above, following lines of inquiry about sport and power illuminated profoundly and extensively that communication and sport matter in a world that is both divided—legally and symbolically—into nations, while simultaneously undergoing the deeply disruptive process of globalization. It is this dynamic, conflictive context, in which the communication and sport nexus is deeply implicated, that is the principal subject of this article.

National–Global

Until the late 20th century, the main object of social inquiry was consensually that of “society,” conceived as bounded space within secure borders. Thus, the world has typically been seen as consisting of many societies:

This dominant society–nation framework did not mean that international relations have been ignored, but the “inter” prefix placed the focus on what happens between discrete societal entities. However, in the last two decades it has been consistently proposed that the process of globalization is massively eroding the integrity and power of nation-states, with the consequence being that in several key respects—such as control over national economies and efficient state regulation of communication and media—it might be claimed that this complex, mobile world is advancing “beyond societies” (Urry, 2000). Many different theories and models of globalization have been proposed, it should be noted, with sundry economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions seen to operate with varying degrees of consistency and efficacy (Ritzer, 2011). There is, though, general agreement that at the heart of this “axial theme of contemporary times” (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2007, p. 1) is the notion that globalization involves a greater interconnectedness across time and space, and that of necessity its advancement involves breaking down boundaries between institutions, people, and practices that are concentrated in nation-states.

Sport is no mere bystander in this process—indeed, it can be suggested that it represents a domain where globalization is at its most advanced (Rowe, 2011). The above-mentioned massive television audiences for global spectacles such as the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, based on the “cultural transfer” of the regulated physical practices originating largely in northern Europe that are now recognized as sport (Guttmann, 1978), could be regarded as harbingers of a fully realized regime of globalization. However, that these global spectacles are organized around sporting nations indicates that even here the nation is not overridden by the global. This is the paradox of what I have previously argued is sport's “repudiation of the global” (Rowe, 2003), where globalization is conceived most strongly (and improbably) as producing global cultural homogeneity. This admittedly provocative position has stimulated some debate (see, e.g., Andrews & Ritzer, 2007) that, it is hoped, assists in the clarification of what is meant by globalization, and how its relationship with sport, communication, and nation can be understood. Communication is central here not only because it is through the wide-ranging, mediated circulation of symbols that the nation can be made easily recognizable to the large, dispersed, and heterogeneous audiences that comprise it, but because sport is unquestionably one of the most potent sources of vibrant, compressed national symbolism. Thus, an “exceptionalist” case such as the United States, where national sport competitions like the World Series, National Basketball Association (NBA), and Super Bowl arguably are regarded as de facto world championships that overshadow any international sport competitions, only serves to reinforce the pivotal role of the nation in the most powerful force in global communication and sport. It is for this reason that I propose in this article that the nation–globalization question remains central to any analytical understanding of communication and sport.

The sport–nation–communication triad has been a crucial precursor to sport having any claims to be part of globalizing culture. Of course, sporting nations and nation-states should not be conflated—there are many cases of nations recognized by international governing bodies that are not nation-states—and, correspondingly, there are nation-states that are temporarily “dissolved” for the purposes of some sporting occasions (Bairner, 2001; Marjoribanks & Farquharson, 2012, p. 77). Thus, while the relationship of much sports culture to the national can be confused and ambivalent, there is no doubt that the nation is still conceptually and operationally pivotal in contemporary sport. But what, precisely, does the national mean in an era of inward capital investment in sport and outward promotion of global sports branding; the movement of professional athletes across the globe as part of the new international division of cultural labor (Miller, Rowe, & Lawrence, 2010), and its mirroring in the diasporic circulation of sport fans; the increasingly untrammeled operation of networked digital media sport (Hutchins & Rowe, 2012) across nations, and so on? In the light of such developments, it is useful to engage in an imaginative exercise—to seek to trace the contours of a “postnational” sport. The nation is addressed here in legal–technical terms (sovereign space recognized by the United Nations), in sporting governmental terms (the sporting nation that may or may not overlap the nation-state), and in symbolic ideational terms (the entity onto which national properties are conferred by sports fans, popular movements, interest groups, governments, and so on).

A postnational sport would, first, require capital investment in sport to operate in a manner entirely unfettered by national jurisdictions and boundaries both in terms of “active” and “receptive” contexts. In such a world, capital would be entirely “blind” to the idea and operative framework of nation, with corporations and markets engaging with sport in a manner detached from the national realm and operating exclusively at the transnational/global level. Correspondingly, circulating sports workers selling their services under the new international division of cultural labor (who are drawn disproportionately from poorer nations with comparatively weak national competitions to play in richer, stronger national competitions—Miller, Lawrence, McKay, & Rowe, 2001) would have to be able to ply their trade in any place in the world without hindrance. The improbability of such a scenario is apparent—although global (including sport) capital is increasingly fluid, it is also concentrated in a small number of nation-states and regions that continue to exercise considerable powers of governance (Hirst & Thompson, 2009), while the global sport labor force circulates according to established patterns of sport migration (Carter, 2011) and must gain permission both to enter individual countries and, additionally, to work in their sports industries. Also, national governments provide considerable direct and indirect financial and other support for sport, which would be regarded as illegitimate nation-based market interventions in a fully globalized sport economy. National governments and private companies would, therefore, be required to cease all support, subvention, and subsidy for sport on national lines, including those concerning bids to host mega sport events like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup.

Even the most powerful and famous global sport brands, such as the EPL and the NBA, would be required in a postnational sport environment to erase their national state of origin and so their nationally constituted competitions. This shedding of national “skin” would have to go further than the strategy of “glocalization” that seeks to reconcile imported sports and national cultures in the recipient societies by synthesizing global and local expressive features (Cho, 2009). These strictures would not only apply to the established Western sport leagues, but emergent Global South sport competitions, like the Indian Premier League, would also be required to “de-nationalize.” So, despite the fact that, for example, the EPL has a majority of players and coaches who are not English; that many of its clubs are owned by Middle Eastern, U.S., and other foreign capital; that the international television audience is far larger than the local one, and the sale of merchandising supported by international promotional tours is an important and growing source of club revenue, the EPL is still marked as “English.” It is based in English cities and played at local stadia and is dependent on the established clubs whose origins go back to industrial England’s formative male working-class player and fan base: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, and other clubs that remain the bearers of English identity despite the multinational nature of the EPL’s economy and personnel.

In addition to such nation-based sport clubs, there are national sport organizations, such as the National Olympic Committees and Football Associations, which administer sports on behalf of international sports government bodies such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. These would have to disband under a postnational regime, alongside the competitions that they administer. National and international sporting competitions would need to be reconfigured on new lines, involving new types of governance structure and units of administration. At the same time, international sporting confederations would need to be reconstituted so that they no longer comprise national delegates supplied by the disbanded national sporting organizations. This change would require them to remove the word “International” from their names—the descriptor that presupposes and names the national entities that are superseded. Correspondingly, sport fans would need to be deterred from national identification through sport. This shift would have many consequences, such as the discouragement of national insignia, flags, songs, and any other displays of nationalism at sporting contests. Diasporic sport fans turning back to countries of origin for social subjectivity sustenance would need to seek extranational modes of identification. Here there would need to be a recasting of the former English politician Norman Tebbit’s famous “cricket test,” which was so described after an interview with the Los Angeles Times in which he asked, “A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?” (quoted in Farrington, Kilvington, Price, & Saeed, 2012). Tebbit’s remarks clearly rest on old-fashioned notions of singular national loyalties among globally mobile populations, but there are echoes of such “tests” of national loyalty still evident in, for example, the supply of information about national sport in pamphlets for new citizens of Australia and Canada, and in complaints about “plastic Brits” in the right-wing British press about the national origins of some Team GB Olympic athletes:

In order to rule such questioning entirely out of order in the context of postnational sport, the question “which nation?” would have to be reconfigured as “what other than nation?” as the wellspring of affective attachment to sport and the organizational fulcrum involving teammates and competitors that is not hyperlocal. This identity modification would involve expunging the nation from collective memory, nostalgic longing, and romantic myth, and disarticulating the sport–nation nexus—symbolic and material, operationalized and imagined—from time, space, and history. The media would be enlisted in this task in being discouraged from constructing and publishing medal tables on national grounds and from promoting patriotism or xenophobia through sport for established and aspirant nations. The expanding range of global media platforms would need to counter patterns of audience use that privilege nationally constituted viewerships. Furthermore, any attempts to intervene in the media sport marketplace in the name of national cultural citizenship by, for example, legally enforceable antisiphoning protection for “events of national importance and cultural significance” (Scherer & Rowe, 2012), would be overturned.

The postnational sport scenario presented above is obviously drawn to highlight extreme possibilities and is offered in the spirit of Jean-Marie Brohm’s (1978) polemic Sport: A Prison of Measured Time in the interests of clarifying what is at stake when it is asserted that globalization must inevitably overdetermine the nation. It is not claimed that the nation is the only locus of sport organization, mediation, affiliation, and identification. Nor is it argued, of course, that sport is unaffected by global/transnational forces and processes—the reverse is demonstrably the case (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2007; Miller et al., 2001). But it is proposed that the idea of nation is so fundamental to the very existence sport—or, more extensively, to the global media sports cultural complex—that the concept of postnational sport, unlike that of the shifting constellation of the nation–sport nexus, remains substantively unimaginable. The analytical task, then, is to recognize the continuing significance of nation without fetishizing or being complicit in the mythologies and fantasies that often surround it, while simultaneously registering the significance of globalization without exaggerating its power as all-consuming and ascribing all-observable change to it.

I have emphasized above that the idea of nation remains prominent not only because nation-states still exercise significant sovereign control within their borders but, more importantly with regard to the subject at hand, because competitive international sport, paradoxically, has been the primary vehicle for globalizing sport. When watching the most “global” sport events via a range of media, we are, in fact, witnessing myriad ways in which nations symbolically connect and divide, form and reform in tapping into collective emotions that could not easily be generated otherwise. In the case of the Olympics, for example, the vast audiences for opening and closing ceremonies are watching small, highly concentrated encapsulations of the national myths and iconographies of the current and succeeding hosts, in the presence of athletes who are all visually marked by nation through their uniforms, in front of a copresent audience that mimics the athletes’ and officials' visual national signifiers, and observed from afar by mediated audiences whose producers/distributors customize their coverage through commentary and shot selection that emphasize national affiliation (Tomlinson & Young, 2006).

But not all sport involves mega events watched by billions—indeed, such sporting moments are necessarily intermittent for logistical reasons (their sheer scale and cost) and in order not to produce “overkill” and saturation. Thus, below the elevated level of the global media sport spectacle are other manifestations of sport that are stratified in national terms, ranging from nationally based sport competitions with very large domestic and international audiences, such as the EPL, La Liga (in Spain), Serie A (Italy), and NBA, or “one offs” like the FA Cup Final and the Super Bowl as well those that are particularly prominent within the nation and among diasporic and some foreign audiences, such as the NFL and Major League Baseball. At lower levels where the sport is of limited national interest, and more closely tied to place and locality, the sport is defined as an integral “folk” element of national culture—as was depicted, for example, in the London 2012 Opening Games Ceremony, with its “opening image of a lost vision of pastoral England: a place of shire horses, sheep and cows, Maypole dancing, home-baking and cricket on the village green” (Billington, 2012, para. 2). Here the intermeshing of the global and national can be observed, as is noted in the following case for the “global–national nexus” advanced by Lee and Maguire (2009, p. 21):

Such an attempt to deal with the nation and globalization paradox resonates with the concerns of this article. It is, of course, at odds with more thoroughgoing iterations of globalization theory that diagnose the inevitable decline and even demise of nations. However, although the nation may in some ways fit well with the “project” of globalization, it remains an actual and potential rallying point for its resistance in both material and symbolic terms.

Horizons

It is apparent from this synoptic discussion that approaching and analyzing the nation–globalization relation regarding communication and sport is an absorbingly difficult task. There are considerable theoretical, conceptual, and terminological disagreements with, for example, some sport researchers, such as Thomas Carter (2011), who find the concept of the “transnational” a more satisfactory analytical tool than the “global” in dealing with the specificities of the local. There are also debates about the future of national sport, with Muhammed Musa (2012), for example, arguing that the nation is a fading force in sport in the face of global sport branding. Differences of this kind are not a sign of intellectual weakness or underdevelopment, but of the vast, shifting analytical and empirical terrain on which communication and sport researchers must operate. Thus, the means by which sport is communicated are changing rapidly under digitization, and in the process creating new audience formations and relations in contexts ranging from small-scale, intimate networks to sprawling, anonymous global mediascapes.

In “looking ahead,” it is essential simultaneously to look backward toward the legacy arrangements that have shaped the communication and sport environment even as they are being reconfigured, and sideways to the wider sociocultural world that both envelopes and interpenetrates communication and sport institutions, practices, uses, and meanings. It is here that a preoccupation with nation and globalization gives way to an expansive research agenda through a process of mutual reinforcement and enrichment. Thus, for example, attending to the future of the sporting nation can inform questions concerning sport’s exercise of gender power through the idealization and marginalization of sexed/gendered citizens. Or careful, informed assessment of utopian and dystopian diagnoses of globalization can help situate particular sports and their mediations appropriately when seeking to grasp their political–economic prospects. Among the frenetic claims making of those communication and sport scholars and industry practitioners whose predictive confidence is often inversely related to its accuracy, the future belongs to organized skepticism in negotiating homage to nation and globalization hubris.