ABSTRACT
In 1996 Australian newspaper baron Rupert Murdoch addressed shareholders of his News Corporation at an annual meeting in Adelaide. ‘Sport absolutely overpowers film and everything else in the entertainment genre,’ he told the gathering, adding that he intended to ‘use sports as a battering ram and a lead offering in all our pay television operations’.2 Unwittingly, he was acknowledging the historical importance of sport to media companies of all technologies since the eighteenth century. Viewing figures around the world underlined this. Eleven of the twenty most
watched American network television shows in the twentieth century were sports programmes, ten of which were Super Bowls. San Francisco’s 1982 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl XVI was the fourth most watched programme ever in US television history. Two of the top six most watched programmes ever in the UK were soccer matches, with the England side’s 1966 World Cup final triumph the most watched programme ever on British television. In Germany, nine of the top ten most viewed programmes were soccer matches.3
