Ian Whittell
The TV stations are the hardware, the sports teams the software. That is the cynical but realistic jargon in an American sports world in which media companies are taking hold. “The long tentacles of media conglomerates are something we have to watch very carefully,” said Bud Selig, commissioner of Major League Baseball. And with good reason.
There is no doubt that American sporting heritage – which baseball and football, at least, have in abundance – is being eroded by trends in ownership. Media companies own 20 of the top clubs in baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey.
A telephone conversation in May highlighted Selig’s concern. Chase Carey, the de facto number three in Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp empire, called Don Smiley from Los Angeles to discuss the purchase of Sports Channel Florida. By the time the call ended, these two TV executives had agreed the biggest baseball transfer ever. The managers and players of the teams affected – Murdoch’s LA Dodgers and the Florida Marlins, owned by media magnate Wayne Huizenga – were not consulted.
Mike Piazza, the self-styled most popular Dodger of the decade, was sent to Florida with Todd Zeile in exchange for five players and, as Sports Illustrated noted tongue-in-cheek, “a cable network to be named later”. The deal was concluded by Dodgers president Bob Graziano, an accountant, and Peter Chernin, Murdoch’s first lieutenant and the man responsible for his Twentieth Century Fox studio.
What caused so much consternation in the sporting world was not so much the fact that baseball’s biggest trade should have been conducted by a marketing man, an accountant and two TV suits from LA. It was not even that Dodgers general manager Fred Claire and manager Bill Russell were informed of it after the deal.
It was more that multimedia ownership of sports teams, an increasingly common phenomenon in the United States, opens a Pandora’s Box of potential conflicts of interest and conspiracy theories. Did the decision to send Piazza to Florida have any relation to Murdoch’s attempt to buy Huizenga’s sports channel? “If anyone is looking for smoking guns, they will be looking for 500 years,” said Fox’s Vince Wladika. “There was no connection whatsoever.” When the LA Dodgers recently met Disney-owned Anaheim Angels in a baseball game, it was billed as Fox vs Disney, Bart Simpson vs Mickey Mouse – except on ESPN, the sports channel now worth more than national network ABC, which described the match as an “historic” meeting.
This editorial stance surprised viewers who have long considered the station an irreverent and exciting broadcaster. The reason? ESPN is owned by Disney.
This is a world where Disney can buy an ice hockey team and name them after a kids’ movie – The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim – exploiting all the obvious marketing opportunities that come with it, particularly when the movie sequel, Mighty Ducks II, came out.
Events in the United Kingdom have been watched keenly in the US this week and some degree of surprise expressed at the sums involved. In a week in which Cleveland real estate magnate Arthur Lerner paid $530- million for National Football League (NFL) franchise Cleveland Browns, Manchester United being valued at $1-billion opened some eyes. Nevertheless, Harvey Schiller, president of the broadcaster Turner Sports, commented: “The Manchester United deal is certainly worth every penny, as Premier League teams have never fully exploited their TV and marketing opportunities.” It is hard to see how Murdoch could recoup such an investment in pure monetary terms.
But, as Barry Horn, sports media analyst with the Dallas Morning News noted, it is not simply a matter of multimedia multimillionaires aiming to make a profit on sports team ownership.
“Everybody in America has a cable network, or so it seems,” said Horn. “The problem is the programming. If you own a cable system, you need programming, and a baseball season is 162 games long. That accounts for a lot of programming you don’t have to worry about over the course of a year.
“Murdoch has the hardware – the TV station – and sport is the software. The rest of the programming might be garbage, week-old South American soccer, sitcom reruns, but people love mainstream sports. You’re talking of a world where Fox lost $350- million on the last four-year NFL contract, but that did not dissuade them from contributing a further $4,4-billion to the latest $17,6-billion package, and a world where the New York Yankees receive $486- million for 12 years from Cablevision, on top of their share of the national deal.”
Nobody recognises that fact more than Murdoch, who told shareholders two years ago that team sport “overpowers film and everything else in the company”.
But has the US fan reacted with the same apoplexy as certain British spectators this week? “There has been no opposition in the US. It is something that has been accepted for a long time,” said Fox’s Wladika. “Fans want to see their teams win and a multimedia company can provide the resources, financial and marketing, to help a team pursue the best players and to help them.”