[...]... analyse the impact of this on the changing cultural contract the game has with the fans We will argue that football in the new media age marks the latest stage of refinement in the sports ongoing commercialisation journey, a process whose roots stretch back into the nineteenth century The book is about trying to understand the contemporary stage of this development and how both the sport and new media interact... understand football in the new media age, without reference to the more general history of the sport in the television age As we suggested in the Introduction, the new media environment is in many ways the latest staging post in a longer history of media evolution, which sees both continuity and change in its interaction with aspects of wider popular cultural activity Thus in many ways this chapter sets the. .. Osborn, 2001: 195) They argue that at the core of these changes is a broad agenda that is driven by the media as it increasingly impacts on footballing culture Significantly they also suggest that this new footballing paradigm in which television in particular takes centre stage has resulted in the concept of the ‘fan’ itself becoming an increasingly problematic concept It is increasingly difficult to... the tentative introduction of a new business model within the television industry, pay per view (PPV) football arriving for the first time in the UK For football the honour of being the first PPV match was bestowed on the Manor Ground home to the then First Division Oxford United in their match against Sunderland in March 1999 It would be the advent of digital technology and the harnessing of this technology... process However given the constraints of time and space, we make no apology for the book’s focus on the wider economic and regulatory framework within which football finds itself operating with regard to the media industries In so doing, we do not underestimate the role that fans play in the structure of the sport, or their role in the increasingly mediated culture within which football is located Specifically... particular industry and find echoes across the wider economy It is not just in this area that economists and lawyers have raised concerns One of the characteristics of the new media age has been a growing concern with the issue of intellectual property (IP) and image rights in general Media rights and competition law The growth of media involvement in football has also spawned an increasing interest in the. .. work within a Introduction 5 wider frame of reference which sees areas such as media studies turning its attention to key areas of the cultural economy, such as sport Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the impact that changes in the wider media environment have had on the game in the late 1990s and the early part of the new century In particular we are interested in examining the way in which the launch... and 5) However the fascinating relationship between the game and the print media remains both beyond the scope of this book, and a project for another day Throughout the book there is a concern with tracking and making sense of the emerging political economy of the media football relationship This raises related concerns about issues of representation and the role of the audience and fans in this process... and rights It highlights the tensions this process generates between traditional media and the clubs and also examines the various business models they are adopting in their new media strategies The next part of the book, Chapter 6, focuses on attempts by actual leagues to extend their control of the mediated game by setting up their own media companies to exploit the rights they hold While this chapter... system of the Internet as a means of creating a larger, more disparate footballing community and globalising the local appeal of particular football clubs Chapter 7 extends this concern with the global dimension of the game by looking at the role of the Internet in major world footballing events, such as the FIFA World Cup of 2002 In addition, this chapter examines the role and impact of interactivity . of Media, Culture and Society and is the author of The Football Imagination: The Rise of Football Fanzine Culture (1995). Football in the New Media Age Raymond. Media Age analyses the impact of media change on the football industry, drawing on extensive interviews with key people in the media and football industries.