Commercialisation and the Media

What commercialisation means, and what caused it

Commercialisation is sport being run for profit: treated as a product to be sold, with money coming in from media rights, sponsorship, advertising, ticketing and merchandise rather than from participants' subscriptions alone.

Cambridge lists five factors that led there, and they feed each other. More media interest brings in more money; more money buys better presentation; better presentation attracts more spectators; more spectators make the sport worth sponsoring; and professionalism is the result of a sport being able to pay its performers.

The golden triangle

The golden triangle is the relationship between sponsorship/business, the media and sport. The name describes why the three cannot be separated: each one holds up the other two, and each one gains from the arrangement.

The media needs sport because live sport draws a large, predictable audience that can be sold to advertisers. Sponsorship/business needs the media because that is how its name reaches the audience, and needs sport because sport gives it a positive public image. Sport needs the media to show the event worldwide and to attract the audience, and needs the sponsor for money to pay performers, run events and improve facilities.

• Media gives sport: money from rights, worldwide exposure, and a bigger potential audience
• Media gives the sponsor: an audience and advertising space around coverage of the event
• Sponsor gives sport: money, equipment, facilities and, sometimes, the event itself
• Sponsor gives the media: advertising income and content built around the association
• Sport gives the media: the event that people actually want to watch
• Sport gives the sponsor: association with success, excitement and a healthy image

The five-way evaluation at a glance

The syllabus names five groups, and a full answer evaluates commercialisation for each of them. Notice that the same change can be a benefit for one group and a cost for another. Increased media coverage is income for the sport, income for the broadcaster and a better view for the remote spectator, but it can also mean a start time moved to suit television, which empties the stadium for the primary spectator.

Use the table to hold the whole evaluation in one place, then develop whichever groups the question names.

Evaluating for the performer or team

For the performer, commercialisation is mainly about money and time. The income is real: professional wages, prize money and individual sponsorship allow a performer to train full time instead of working, and the money pays for coaching, physiotherapy, nutrition and sports science that raise performance.

The costs are just as real. When income depends on results and on being seen, the pressure to win becomes financial as well as sporting, and a performer who cannot cope with that pressure may use performance-enhancing drugs or bend the rules. Media and sponsor obligations are extra working time, taken out of the same week as training and recovery.

There is also a loss of control. A sponsor pays for an image, so a performer is pushed toward behaving and looking a certain way, and a comment or an action that damages that image can cost a contract.

Judgement: for a leading performer in a well-funded sport the gains clearly outweigh the costs, because the money buys a full-time career that would not otherwise exist. For a performer in a lower-profile sport, or one whose income depends on staying visible, the money is thinner and the dependency on results is greater.

Evaluating for the sponsor or business

For the sponsor, commercialisation is a marketing decision. A business buys an association with a sport or team to put its name in front of a large, loyal and often affluent audience, and to borrow the feelings of excitement, health and success that the sport generates. Hoardings, shirts and stadium naming mean the brand is seen repeatedly, and hospitality around the event is a way of building relationships with clients.

The risk is that the sponsor does not control the product. It cannot guarantee that the team will win, that the performer will behave, or that the sport will avoid a drugs, violence or corruption scandal. A sponsor attached to a sport that is publicly shamed can lose more in reputation than it ever gained, and the money is already spent.

Notice the two-sided nature of the same fact. Supporters may resent a sponsor's branding as intrusive, so the same association that raises awareness can also generate negative feeling toward the brand.

Judgement: sponsorship makes commercial sense where the audience matches the company's target market and the sport's image is protected, which is why sponsors write behaviour clauses into contracts and why a scandal can end a deal quickly.

Evaluating for the event or sport

For the event or the sport as a whole, commercialisation is the source of its growth. Media rights and sponsorship pay for the running and the expansion of the event, for facilities and for the performers, and they turn a minority sport into a global one with a worldwide audience. They also create jobs in coaching, officiating, administration, sports science and broadcasting.

The cost is that the sport loses some control of itself. Rules and formats are changed to suit television, such as shorter formats introduced to fit a broadcasting slot, extra breaks for advertisements, and start times set for an audience in another time zone. The calendar is filled with more events, which wears performers down and increases injuries.

There is also a structural risk. A sport that depends on sponsors and broadcasters for its income is vulnerable if that interest moves elsewhere, and a sport split across paid platforms can lose the casual audience that once watched it for free.

Judgement: for a sport trying to grow, the gains outweigh the costs, because exposure and money do more for the sport than unchanged rules protect. For a well-established sport the balance is tighter, as the changes made for television begin to damage the competition itself.

Evaluating for primary and secondary spectators

Primary spectators are the ones at the event, and they feel commercialisation in the pocket and in the schedule. They get better facilities, catering, big screens and replay, and they see the best performers in the world live, in an atmosphere a broadcast cannot copy. They pay for it with higher prices, with start times moved to suit television rather than to suit travel, with advertising and naming rights on everything they look at, and with rules slowed down for review.

Secondary spectators are the remote audience, and they gain access. They can watch an event on the other side of the world, with multiple camera angles, replays, slow motion, statistics and expert analysis, at a fraction of the cost of a ticket.

They pay in different ways. Coverage is spread across several paid platforms, so following a season can cost far more than one subscription. The atmosphere of the event is lost, and the viewer receives the event through the broadcaster's choices: which replay is shown, how often the advertisement interrupts, and which pundit's interpretation of a decision is heard first.

Judgement: the remote audience is the group that has gained most from commercialisation, because access has widened enormously, whereas the primary spectator has gained in comfort and quality but lost on price and control of the schedule. Neither gain is free, and in both cases the spectator is the audience that the broadcaster is selling to the advertiser.