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Reframe: Episode 87.2

New Media Technology, Global Geopolitics, and the Future of Sport

Reframe Episode 87.2

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On this special bonus episode, we continue the conversation with Adam Beissel, Miami University assistant professor sport leadership and management.

This time we look ahead to the future of sport. We discuss how various technological, economic, and social factors will continue to shape the industry, as well as what new media and even global geopolitics will mean for the kinds sports that may dominate the U.S. in the years ahead.

Additional music: Lee Rosevere, “Let That Sink In,” “Thinking It Over.” Broke For Free, “Only Instrumental.”

Read the transcript

James Loy

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast by the hosts and guests may or may not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Miami University.

James Loy

This is reframe the podcast from the College of Education, health and society on the campus of Miami University in Oxford Ohio.

On our last episode we spoke with Adam Beissel, a Miami University assistant professor of sport leadership and management, about all the ways data and analytics are not only changing the sport industry, but how it's also transforming business and even culture more broadly. That episode is available now. It's called how the "sports analytics revolution is changing society," but there was so much more to talk about and we had such an interesting conversation that we wanted to give you the chance to hear the rest of it. So on this special bonus episode with Adam Beissel, we look ahead to the future of sport and how various economic, social, cultural and technological forces and even global politics will continue to shape the industry as well as what it may mean for the kinds of sports that dominate here in the US in the years and decades ahead.

Adam Beissel

The biggest change for the sport industry over the next decade or two will be the convergence of technology and economics within the sport industry. In particular, what we're looking at is new m odes of media consumption and streaming. Right, so the demise of the traditional cable package, I think some people are perhaps overstating that. I think 75% of most television watchers still have a traditional cable package but to understand how that's gonna influence sport, you have to kind of understand how traditional cable works. Most sport leagues generate the preponderance of their annual revenue from broadcast revenue agreements, right. They are  set long in advance. They pay bill ... networks like NBC, ABC, they pay billions of dollars for the rights to broadcast sporting leagues like the NFL. Those networks generate the revenue to support those investments from advertisements and also in some cases, some minor subscription fees. So we're talking about a dollar, a dollar or two,  from your cable bill goes to pay off the sports rights fees. In the case of ESPN, it's about 3 to $4 every month. Whether you watch ESPN or not, when you pay your cable bill, you're subsidising sport, right? But as technology changes and those traditional cable and satellite television packages reduce, you're now seeing streaming become much more prominent. And we're at this tipping point where it will probably happen in the next 5 to 10 years, but there will be a sport league that goes fully streaming. And what's interesting for me to think through, and I speak with my students about a lot is how might a sport change or the way that we consume sport in an actual stadium change? If the rights are now on a streaming service, whether you don't have to have built in ad breaks. So what happens if Amazon 20 years from now has the broadcast rights to the NFL? You don't necessarily have to have an ad break every 8 to 10 minutes and fill a 3.5 hour broadcast with an hour of advertisements because the subscribers are paying through their monthly subscription fee, 12 or $13 to subsidize that investment. So it could be that an NFL game gets reduced to two hours because you don't have to have those built in ad breaks. Now, maybe I'm a bit optimistic. Would the NFL want to forego additional revenue when now you can collect subscription fees and the built in commercials? But I do think there is value in reducing the overall start to finish time in an NFL game. And that might change how the game is contested. Right? Coaches coach around Advertising breaks. Right? So they know that in basketball, for instance, there are set commercial breaks at the under 16, under 12, under eight, under four minutes in college basketball. Coaches will substitute players out and substitute players in based on the expectation of television timeouts, TV timeouts. But if you don't need those built in tv timeouts anymore because the economic model is such that the revenue collected by those leagues come from subscriptions rather than advertisements for dish soap or car insurance. What does that mean? In terms of what we're seeing in the arena in the stadium. Maybe it changes how we experience sport in the flesh.

James Loy

And maybe even how certain athletes are trained or prepared for certain positions, right?

Adam Beissel

Yeah. And athletes are specialized into particular positions. I n the NFL for instance, you've got the third down pass rush specialist whose job is Maybe to play 8-12 plays per game and sack the quarterback on third down. If we're shortening the length of time in between series, um, maybe it changes the type of athletes that are valued, maybe that pass rush specialist goes away or maybe there are new specialists that emerge. Maybe I'm being idealistic. Maybe I'm being optimistic about these things. But I do think that as the media technology landscape changes within contemporary sport, not just in the U. S. But all around the world. It's going to change how we as fans sitting in a stadium might experience live sports.

James Loy

I don't think you're being idealistic or optimistic ... maybe with some of the specific changes you would like to see. But it's amazing to think about how interconnected it all is. I mean, sports became this thing that just were fun to play then people started watching, which changed how they were played. The broadcast media showed up which further change things. And now that is even intersecting with new technology and media and streaming services, which is changing things even more. So it's amazing to me to think about how interconnected it all is, but also how it seems like it's almost at the mercy of these inevitable changes maybe.

Adam Beissel

Yeah. So we can turn to the college football landscape right now as a great understanding of how powerful particular networks and media companies are at really transforming sport. So setting aside some of the NIL - Name, image likeness changes that we're experiencing. You've recently seen Texas and Oklahoma declare that they are going to or they plan to leave the Big 12 football conference or athletic conference in favor of a move to the SEC. The SEC has largely funded by ESPN and in the Walt Disney company, who sees bringing in teams like Texas and Oklahoma as a kind of financial no brainer and what had driven over the past decade or so conference realignment within the NCA was the growth and investment from sport media companies like ESPN and CBS. And we're about to see another phase of that as streaming rights and the revenue from streaming rights. So the Disney plus app and ESPN plus streaming services, collecting 12 to $15 from 100 million subscribers every month. There's so much money around that they can sort of say, "well, hold on a second, we're going to use that money to find the best college football programs out there to create content that's going to generate subscriptions, generate eyeballs and therefore revenue. And so the influence of media companies are really changing in college sports the alignments of historically grounded conferences which have in some cases been around for 100 years.

James Loy

Yeah. How does your research fit into what we've been talking about? What are some of the things you look at and study to help you understand how all these global pieces fit together?

Adam Beissel

Yeah, so my main research is on global sport mega events and the geopolitics of global and international sport. And so what I'm really looking at is the intersection between sport, economics, and global geopolitics. And one of the best ways to look at that is through international support mega events. And so that's kind of a catch all term for events that we tend to watch on a, you know, quadrennial basis. So we're talking about the Olympic and Paralympic games, the men's and women's FIFA World Cups, and in some cases the commonwealth games or the men's and women's rugby world cups and a couple other international events that generate large amounts of corporate sponsorship, large amounts of viewership and attention over small periods of time. A  lot of my research focuses on, first and foremost, how do those events come to be in terms of getting through bid document analysis? Who's going to pay for them? What are the promises? But then also looking at things post talk right or ex post as we say? And did those promises live up to their billing or to what extent did the cost of hosting those events come in over or under based on those promises? And so really what I'm looking at is the economic social and kind of political implications of hosting global sport mega events.

James Loy

And you have a pretty big project coming up around the next the World Cup? What's that involved?

Adam Beissel

Yeah, So in 2026 the United States along with its North American neighbors, Mexico and Canada will co-host the FIFA Men's World Cup. So by sports mega events standards, the FIFA Men's World Cup is meant what many consider to be the second largest global sport mega event behind uh the Olympic games. The basis of kind of my research or what I've done thus far is really looking at the formation of that bid, the joint hosting format. And really the politics that went into that partnership when it was announced in the summer of 2018. So certainly the summer of 2018 we had former president Trump in office and the politics and the relationships between our North American neighbors at that time were not all that strong. Right? Particularly Trump running on a platform of build that wall. Right? Saying derogatory things about our Mexican neighbors, revoking trade agreements with Canada. And so the announcement of this international soccer tournament that was billed under the banner of United as One, which was their branding campaign raised many concerns. Right? And questions around how can you have this international sport mega event billed as a celebration of unity and global partnership at a moment where politically these countries have had their lowest kind of arrangements in decades? And so a lot of my research sort of focused on that context. Both what did the bid promise? What are the economic promises? How was it branded and sold to FIFA and the global community? And what were the kind of geopolitics that underpin the bid Such that it eventually secured hosting rights for the 2026 men's World Cup?

James Loy

Right. I mean, that makes me think of like the messages we've heard surrounding sport forever. It's they're always under this banner of it brings us all together. There's this unifying force and Olympics are, you know, the world community promoting peace and understanding and all that. Does that actually seem -- when you put it through that lens -- is  it disconnected from what's actually happening in the political reality? Does it make it seem like it's just lip service to an idea that's not really true? Or do you think that sport is losing its power to actually unite people?

Adam Beissel

And I think that's a great question. You know, certainly that discourse about sport being unifying exists, right? This idea that there aren't politics in sports, most scholars, most of us would agree. Well, that's flatly false, right, that sport can be a unifying thing, right? When the Milwaukee Bucks win the NBA Championship and 100,000 people show up outside the arena to sort of celebrate that does create some sort of shared sense of identity for the people in Milwaukee, but by the same token sport can also be exclusionary. It can be exploitative, it can highlight the worst aspects of society. So you've got both things going on and support mega events are kind of the pinnacle of that dual sense, right? So if we look at the Tokyo 2020 games as a great illustration, this was a games that the Japanese government did not want to host They said, "Please do not come here." But the International Olympic committee, the IOC that has the authority of those games said, " hold on a second, we're having these games whether you support it or not." And so that simple fact there right between the kind of politics of who controls global sport and how can a non-government organization, a sport organization, have the say to kind of impose itself on a community that didn't want the games, a community that supported the Games for $5 billion of costs. That now we're gonna cost $25 billion in total costs, of which the IOC is not gonna pick up any of that. So how do we reconcile that? How do we kind of live with that contested nature of staging these sports mega events? I think is what scholars in my area are really trying to unpack. And don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the Olympic games, I watched some of the events, but what I'm trying to get my students to think about, certainly, is to think critically about not only what they're watching, but how that stuff is produced and who is benefiting from it and who is being disadvantaged, marginalized, excluded or bearing the sizable economic cost of hosting that sport mega event.

James Loy

When you do work with students, what are some of the other things you try to reframe their thinking around or try to get them to see sport in a different way, especially when you pull the camera back and think about it in this larger, you know, global sense.

Adam Beissel

Yeah, so I mean we tend to live our lives, particularly our students, from an American centric point of view. So when we think about sport, we're thinking about football, basketball, baseball. The Super Bowl tends to be the pinnacle of American sports viewership and we put it in viewership numbers. I mean we look at 100 million viewers which is no small feat, right? 100 million viewers in this day and age of anything is significant. That also means, you know, that's only about 35% of the U. S. Public. So there are a lot more people not watching the Super Bowl that actually are watching the Super Bowl. But if you put that in the scale of global sport, it's actually pretty insignificant. So your typical Barcelona real Madrid regular season match up in S pain is going to generate twice as many if not five times as many eyeballs or viewers as the American super Bowl, you look at the Indian Premier League,  so that's a cricket league in India and the viewership numbers in a country with a billion people are even more significant than NFL viewership in North America. And so when you put American sport, while it seems really significant and impactful to us, when you put it in kind of that global context, there are sports and sporting events and leagues around the world that I try to get my students to think about and as we become much more globally connected through technology and changes in kind of media, it's possible that they, as students working in the sport industry, might end up working in those leagues, working alongside those leagues or working against those leagues in some cases. Right. So if you're working for the NFL trying to grow the NFL in London, you have to have a good understanding of the cultural, social and economic significance of the Premier League in London. Right. And so what I'm trying to get my students to think of is not only sport in America in a kind of contextual sort of way, but then putting North American sport and the North American sport industry in that global context.

James Loy

Do you think that might be happening a bit naturally too? I mean, I think ... maybe not with everybody, but especially amongst younger people. I think I have heard you say that you often over hear students talking like in the hallway about like the European Soccer League, which is not a conversation that used to happen right? Like today, I know a lot of soccer fans that are my age and younger and that was never a thing when I was growing up. But people amongst the older generation still continue to talk about more traditional American things like the NFL draft and such. So I mean is there may be just a natural, organic shift towards this growing cultural awareness of sport from a global perspective, or at least more so than in the past?

Adam Beissel

Yeah, and I think the thing that I try to articulate to my students is that sport is what we call a contested terrain, right? This idea that sport leagues are vying for supremacy in terms of viewership, eyeballs, commercial dollars and What was the dominant sport 100 years ago -- Boxing, horse racing, maybe American baseball is not today. And although it's hard for us to imagine that the NFL won't be this dominant behemoth in perpetuity, it's probably not going to be. And so things change over time and it's not only what we consume, but how we consume and which particular sport leagues adopt to changes in media technology quicker are likely going to be the league's that dominate 20 to 30 years from now. And so the kind of bring it full circle. I think what I'm trying to get my students to think about is that notion of the contested terrain. It's easy for our students to identify how a North American sport league like the N B A is pursuing global markets, right. They are trying to expand it to China, into India and Africa to grow the NBA's product. Similar with the NFL, similar to Major League Baseball. But what are students don't often think of is that there are international sport leagues, looking at the American sport market in a similar way. For example, the English Premier League sees the potentially lucrative North American sport market as its goal. In fact, there are more English premier league fans in America than there are in England. Why? Well, because of population differences, right. There's six times as many people in the United States as there are in England. And so the globalizing impetus is of North American sporting league conglomerates are matched by the same ones from other sports leagues around the world and other sport competitions. Rugby for instance, sees America as this sort of blank canvas where they can try and sell the new Zealand All Blacks or the rugby world Cup and try and grow rugby in this country. And so a lot of our students don't think about those external sport forms and sport leagues viewing America as this seemingly blank canvas for global growth. They only understand North American sports leagues looking at other countries as a potential for market expansion.

James Loy

Is that hard you think for some people to wrap their head around? I mean in America we are always used to being the exporter of culture. We've talked a lot about movies and music and popular culture and a lot of that gets, you know, emanates out from the US. But to think about it the other way around can be a pretty big mind shift. I mean, is that sometimes difficult to grasp?

Adam Beissel

I think so, I think once you put it in those terms, right, that this idea that global sports ... it's a dialectic, right? That there's this two way relationship between Global Sport Leagues and international markets and it's that contested terrain and we don't know 50 years from now what is going to be the kind of dominant sport form? The ones that American families gather around the TV and watch. Heck, maybe we won't even do that in 50 years. Right? Maybe individuals gather around their phone by themselves and like text their friends or their family members across the living room while they're watching their unique programs. But there's a very real possibility that's not going to be the NFL. I t might be the N BA and it might be some sport that we haven't even seen yet. Right? Particularly the growth of action sports among young people. So here we're talking about skateboarding and speed rock climbing, which was just in the Olympic Games and surfing. They will certainly grow. The question is, will the bubble burst, right? I s there simply going to be too much content in sport or otherwise for people to consume? And I think sport can learn a little bit from some of the other industries, particularly television, in the age of big tv, as they call it, right? Where there's just so much content out there that it's really hard to generate sustainable viewership or interest because there's just so much content being produced. There's simply not enough hours in the day. And so the thing that sport leagues are going to confront is a narrowing of sport interest based on media changes and the consumer preferences of different markets, 

James Loy

It certainly seems like we're in the middle of a lot of change. Do you feel like it's an exciting time or in a very uncertain time as far as what lies ahead? I mean, I feel like maybe if you're a traditionalist, you know, and you want things to stay the same, it might be kind of um, I don't know, apprehensive time. But, you know, if you're excited about evolution and change and, you know, new things on the rise, and it might be a pretty exciting time.

Adam Beissel

Yeah, so I would say keep an open mind, um, things will be changing as they always have, right, you know, in the 1950s we listen to V in Scully called games from the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio, and 20 years after that, the Dodgers were in Los Angeles and you were watching on television, and it seems like things are kind of uncertain right now. But I can assure you that change has always been part of the sport industry, at least historically, and it will continue to do so. It's just the speed and rate of that change I think will be accelerated over the next decade or two.

James Loy

Adam Beissel  is an assistant professor of sport leadership and management at Miami University where he teaches courses on sport economics and global sport perspectives. And this is the reframed podcast. Thank you for listening to this bonus episode and many more regular episodes are always available. You can find them wherever you listen to your podcasts.