ABSTRACT
Sport has become a significant global industry. As Westerbeek and Smith (2003) point out and is discussed in this collection, the sport market is a truly global market driven by the universal nature of sport competition. The worldwide appeal of sport and the age of television (Wolfe, Meenaghan and O’Sullivan, 2002) have created the basis for commercially exploiting the global market that sport represents and that has been expanded as television and retail global sports brands have been developed. The emergence of the major commercial potential of sport has been in many respects, according to Meenaghan et al. (2002), a function of the parallel symbiotic relationships of sport and sponsorship and sport and the media (Boyle and Haynes, 2009). The attempted takeover of Manchester United by BSkyB in 1998 highlighted how sport and particularly football has become increasingly commercialised. Football easily wins the global supremacy in sport.
