ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two threads of the mediatization of the Federation Internationale de Football (FIFA) football men's World Cup. The first traces the historiography of the rhetorical use of the televised coverage of the World Cup, which helps us to understand how new technologies are accommodated in the institutional structures of global sports organizations and broadcasters to make a sport mega-event "televisual". The second focuses on the nature of the World Cup as a global media event and how it is consumed. The FIFA World Cup can be characterized as a global universal sporting mega-event, which is increasingly married with large-scale cultural events for investment in tourism and attracting a broader audience via global media. Increasingly concerned with the centrality of media to its global success, the mediatization of the World Cup has been historically formed and shaped by a range of social, cultural, economic and technological processes.
