Sports and the Media
By: Emily Forloines & Alex Wenrich
On October 24, we discussed the importance of the media in the sport industry. It seems like sports and the media have always gone together, but that's not really the case. When sports were really becoming popular, the athletes and players didn't want the attention because they were just playing to play and have fun. Now the media has a hand in almost every aspect of sport. You see these huge contracts with TV channels worth hundreds of million or even billions of dollars just to air that team's games.
The NFL is one of those organizations that can dish out an extraordinary amount of money to these TV companies. Recently, the National Football League's TV contracts have come to a close which means it was up for grabs. The have decided to extend their nine-year contracts with FOX, NBC, and CBS. These networks are expected to pay about 60% more. These new agreements will run from the end of the 2013 season to 2022.
The complete finical numbers are quite known but these three network stations are expected to pay around $3 billion a year for the rights to air the NFL games. While all this is happening, ESPN has also upped their deal with the NFL at an annual rate of $1.9 billion. With all of this plus all the other television providers with their own packages and smaller radio stations, that's about $200 million dollars per team and that is before any tickets, merchandise, or food and beverages have been sold.
It is easy to say that the economic business between the sport industry and the media industry is a very lucrative business!
According to chapter 12 in Coakley's text, sports depend on the media but the media also depends on sports. If you were to take away sports from the media, a huge amount of old and new media space would free up. But if you were to take the media out of sports, sports would go back to what they were prior to the explosion of the media. Coakley also explains, on page 406, the downside of media having so much say within the sport industry. The game start times have been altered to fit television schedules and even people's lives. The main sports and big teams play late, after everyone is home from work and finished their dinners. In football especially, they have TV time-outs built into the game so advertisements can be shown. It has become so scheduled and unnatural at some points that some may even argue that it has taken the reality out of the sports we love.
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