Globalisation of Sport

Modern Sport and the media have developed simultaneously and symbotically supplying each other with the necessary resources for development: capital, audiences, promotion and content.

Critically discuss this statement in relation to the changing nature of professional sport in the U.K.

Coakley (2003:21) defines sport as "institutionalized competitive activities that involve rigorous physical exertion or the use of relatively complex physical skills by participants motivated by internal and external rewards".

This comment towards sport in this day in age reflects more on the external rewards of participation in sport that are more predominant to the viewer.

In sport in this day an age we have a clear example of a "Global form of mass entertainment" (Martinez, 2008: 300).

This essay will explore the relationship between the media and sport in the United Kingdom and the impact it is having globally. This will be done exploring texts and journals on the different areas within media and sport. In the hope that this will give us a more in depth view of the state of professional sport in the UK.

Globalization in the UK

The UK sporting industry over the past few years has taken the route of becoming globalised. Globalization has often been at the centre of "intense political disrepute" (Jarvie, 2003: 537).

There are some that see globalization as the key to the creation of jobs and economic and wealth.

. However others see globalization as the cause of inequality and as the route of some biased problems within the overlooking of certain sports and people within the sporting world (Jarvis, 2003).

Certainly within the UK the government is heavily involved with achieving sporting success and winning major sporting championships, (Allison, 2005) in fact in this day an age you are more likely to hear the Prime minister Gordon Brown discussing England's sporting achievements in the Ashes then you are about what he is intending to do over the ongoing problems in the warzones of Afghanistan.

The pressures of Globalisation have began to lead to the demise of the ‘third world' from the global sporting arena, in huge Global sports such as Football, players are being poached from these ‘third world' countries by the western world and these countries cannot keep up with the western world in terms of there sporting facilities being so far behind technically as well as the lack of facilities, an example of this is Hockey, which in countries like the UK and Australia are developing there facilities like there artificial water based pitches which lead to a faster quicker playing base, where as countries such as India are still playing a poor standard pitches like Astros and Shale's. This is leading to the UK and Australia beginning to dominate the international scene (Allison, 2005).

(Jarvie, 2003) discusses how Global dominance in sport results from a variety of factors, one of the most namely being the ‘Media'.

So why is it that media is playing such a large role in the sporting world, it certainly doesn't entirely depend on sports in order to make money, magazines, television programmes, movies and the internet is testament to that and yet can sport survive without the media?

Historically sport has thrived before but now with the globalisation of sport, sport has become a business, Conn (1997:175) highlighted that "like much else in Britain, football needed to become more business like, and it ended up no more than a business".

Sport is in this day an age is more than just where men and women compete athletically and socially, it is a corporate run industry that is medially run by privately owned companies and it is in the end a business and its main target is to make profits. The marriage of sports and the media has been strengthened by the extortionate amounts of money coming from corporations that see sport as a tool for promoting profits and beliefs that fall in line with their own personal and corporate interests. (Coakley, 2003).

An great example of sport being a global cooperate business in this day and age is the football club ‘Manchester United' from the English Barclays Premier League, ‘Manchester