Football and television

Today it is difficult to imagine football without television or a television schedule bereft of football. As a result over the last decade or so academic writing about sport and football in particular has mushroomed. What we want to do in the first section of this chapter is outline some of the previous writing on the relationship between the football industry and the media. In particular we focus on that work which has traced the impact that television has had on the structure and financing of the sport in the UK. In the following section, we analyse the key milestones which characterise the relationship between television and football over the last few years. We argue that it is impossible to understand football in the new media age, without reference to the more general history of the sport in the television age. As we suggested in the Introduction, the new media environment is in many ways the latest staging post in a longer history of media evolution, which sees both continuity and change in its interaction with aspects of wider popular cultural activity. Thus in many ways this chapter sets the broader historical context within which the rest of the book is placed.