The revolution is being televised

If the ideals of the 1960s quickly evaporated from the sporting world, a different type of revolution did take place. New sources of revenue were emerging that would transform the economics of sport, destroying the necessity for amateurism and draining the willpower of all but the most ascetic advocates of the amateur ethos. And, as with the development of newspapers and print media in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the emergence of radio in the inter-war years, it was a new form of media that would be the catalyst for this revolution in sports economics. Television. In the 1950s, the emergence of television started to transform the traditional

sports business model, which had relied on spectators attending matches for the overwhelming bulk of its income. Television technology had become practical in the 1920s and by the late 1930s TV stations had begun broadcasting with varying degrees of success in North America, western Europe and the USSR. As the 1997 film First Contact eerily highlighted, the first sporting event to be televised was the 1936 Berlin Olympics by the Nazi government. It was followed by a specially arranged soccer match between Arsenal’s first and reserve teams broadcast by the BBC in 1937 and a Columbia versus Princeton college baseball match in 1939 by NBC in America.2 Nevertheless, until the late 1940s television remained a niche product, the preserve of the rich or the technological intelligentsia, and was dwarfed by the ubiquity of radio. But as television technology made rapid advances and as the cost of a set became

affordable, ownership ballooned. In 1951 TV ownership in the US broke the

10 million mark. By 1953 it had doubled to 20 million. Ten years later there were over 50 million sets in American households, covering over 90 per cent of the population.3 Growth in the UK was slower but no less profound. There were 10 million TV sets in 1960 and 90 per cent coverage was not reached until 1968. In western Europe by 1970 TVs could be found in 69 per cent of German households, 59 per cent of French and 54 per cent of Italian.4