ABSTRACT

Television, in its unique capacity to distribute visual content across vast distances nearly simultaneously, has radically shaped the premises of football consumption and fandom on a number of levels. However, as demonstrated above, electronic mass media and television in particular must not be understood as an external corruption of the game because its proliferation is rooted in the same historical configuration as spectator sports. Moreover, in the symbiosis of spectator sports and television, arising out of their common socio-economic framing, each has grown into an innate aspect of the other. However, television – which to many theorists constituted the quintessential cultural form of postmodernity – has propelled aspects and articulations of formal rationality in contemporary football to a degree that forces a shift of our focus from the analysis of television in its consequential nature to an analysis of television as social, cultural and technological form in the postmodern realm.