Media Influence On Sports

In the last 100 years, a lot of the sports that we have nowadays did not yet exist or they were played with different style, rules and were not accessible to everyone. In the early 1900s, the participants in sports were athletes considered as amateurs. Moreover, they were not considered as professionals athletes as they had different jobs and they were just doing sports activities for fitness, leisure and entertainment. The way that they played/viewed/consumed sport 100 years ago was different for numerous different reasons.
First of all and primary, the athletes in the early to mid-1900s did not have the equipment, facilities, technology and the apparel that the athletes can have nowadays. Another reason that made it more difficult for all

This partnership is characterised by the development of a major global industry. (Stead, p.184) As mentioned above sports industry in the early 20th century showed a massive transformation through the impact of the media. The media increased people’s interest into sports and had an impact on the way that sport is consumed. The media that existed before the 20th century was the newspaper but before the early 1900s, the newspapers were not emphasising to cover sports in their pages. Nevertheless, the start of the sports development was in the early 1900s when newspapers changed their policy, developed their sports section, and saw that the interest in sports increased at the time. Wenner pointed out “the newspapers did everything they could to encourage this development, even going so far as to publish the rules of various games to educate the uninitiated.” (Wenner, 1989,

Media has altered the nature of sports in numerous ways. The main impacts of the media that changed the face of sport were not based on the athletes’ needs but on the viewer’s fits and also on the profits of the media companies. “When sports exist just for the participants, there is no urgent need to advertise games, report the action, publish results and interpret what happened. The players already know these things, and they are the only ones who matter.” (Coakley and Pike, 2014, p.410) Some of the changes that media made in sports are timetabling changes of sports events, rule changes, speed up play, more goals or points, and the addition of more timeouts. These are some of the examples that the media changed into sports to attract viewers and to be more marketable. In addition, media played a massive role in the development of new competitions, events and leagues. All of these changes are influenced by the commercials that entered the sports industry through media. The advertisements started to be everywhere in the sports. Colourful uniforms with sponsors and advertisements to attract the viewer’s eye. The stadiums were started to fill with advertisements signs everywhere, clubs were changing their names and stadiums gained names of sponsors. Furthermore, traditions started disappearing from the sports in the mid of 1900s as a result of the business industry that the media