High Court action, debt-laden media corporations, threatened strike action, collapsed pay-TV ventures and attempts to woo audiences with a puppet monkey: the marriage of the media and sport has taken some peculiar turns at the start of the new century. For most people, most of the time, sport means media sport. The media set our parameters of what sport means in society, and they offer our most regular contact with sporting heroes. Sport is one of the most cherished forms of media content, and broadcasting rights to access sporting events have become a central feature of the media economy.

The industries of sport and the media are inexorably intertwined. One cannot pick up a newspaper, watch television news or browse the Internet without noticing the ubiquitous nature of sport across all media forms. As new information and communication technologies are innovated at an incredible pace, so the appetite for sports content follows closely behind. There can be little doubt that the relationship between the two industries has been transformed in the multichannel age. However, the promised new audiences for digital television platforms, broadband Internet and third-generation (3G) mobile phones and heightened streams of income for sport have largely failed to materialise. If we take the case of the most popular media sport, football, more clubs are in debt than ever before as player salaries escalate and pay-TV channels struggle to sustain their investment in the sport in the wake of an advertising slump and a slowdown in new subscribers (Boyle and Haynes, 2004).