The Media Power of Sports - April 22, 2026

Hi everyone and welcome to today's masterclass in health. The media power sports. A huge thank you to our team from University of Guadalajara for being here today to help with Spanish translation. And thank you so much to Dr. Victoria Jackson for joining us again for our last masterclass of the semester. As always, if you want to listen to the Spanish translation, feel free to use the globe icon on the bottom of your screen. All you do is you click the globe and it'll put you in the Spanish translation room. If there's anything on the screen that you would like to scan and translate, feel free to use any of these free apps. And with that, I will go ahead and pass it over to you, Dr. Jackson. Thank you. I'm going to share my screen now. And so you should be seeing my slideshow. Yep, perfect. >> conflicts with the zoom bar. There we go. So hi everybody. My name is Victoria Jackson. I'm a member of the history faculty at Arizona State University. I teach sports history and I also co-direct the Great Game Lab, which explores how the US connects to the world through sport and also how sport connects all of us. You can learn more about the Great Game Lab by going to greatgamelab.asu.edu. It's more of a content website than it is an academic website. So there's a lot of fun stuff on there that you can explore. We have a pretty vibrant active blog where we publish a lot of kind of more ideas journalism than anything else. And we record videos with athletes and people who work in sport and what we call set piece conversations. These are with like protagonists in the Great Game. Also for for those who weren't able to make the last of these masterclass sessions focused on global sport. Just to explain a little bit about myself and my little bit of a non-traditional pathway. I I was an elite athlete in the United States both collegiately and professionally. Track and field person. And I never really It never occurred to me that I could take sports seriously in my academic studies until everything clicked. And now I I teach our sports history curriculum at ASU and I get to work on all sorts of fun sport and society projects. And today we're going to be talking about the mediatic power of sport. This is might come as a surprising topic, but I think it's really fascinating. So I look forward to having a conversation around any questions you might have as we go through this topic. Once upon a time, media and sport represented two very different universes and they were wary of each other and sport was especially wary of media. Sports revenue came from ticket sales. Teams and their leagues were almost entirely dependent upon gate receipts. So they wanted people to come and watch them play their sports in their stadiums. They'd introduce innovative methods to attract audiences to ensure that these spectators would keep coming and winning mattered most to keep those spectators coming. As various new media technologies developed, sports owners and business people were worried about letting broadcasters in because they thought it could kill their business. Only later did they see that sports could have more than one revenue stream. In other words, you could make money through ticket sales and through selling your media rights to broadcast companies and eventually also through corporate partnerships and these sorts of things. As various new media technologies developed, we start to see sports owners embracing and also kind of adapting to and shifting to learn how to work with media. And so we can think of this history as first being one of the mediatic power of sport. And and that sport and media are kind of converging. And so it's a long history that chronologically takes place over two periods. First, sport had to adjust to media or what we can call the mediatization of sport. Later, media ends up having to adjust to sport. So the tables turn. And we can see this later period as the sportification of media, which becomes a 21st century phenomenon. And that's the period we're in right now. Sport is shaping the future of media. But you know, I am a historian, so we're going to be diving in with this history. And what I mean by converging is that one is becoming the other and the other is becoming the first. This this history really plays out across the second half of the 20th century beginning in the 1960s because this transformation is really spawned by television. But of course we had media technologies that came before television. And [laughter] this is some of the quirkiest, most fun history I think that I get to talk about. So during this era, you know, at the turn of the 19th to 20th century when modern sport is emerging around the world as both an activity, right? People play sports, but especially as an entertainment industry where people go and want to spend their leisure time watching sport. You know, we have people going and watching games in person. That was the way people engaged before kind of innovative technological developments. And the first of these innovative technological developments was this thing called the playograph. And so it's this like mechanical machine that men would operate. They'd receive telegraph messages from the stadium getting the kind of play-by-play with then they would put on this board. So they would move these little blocks around the bases to represent the runners. They'd put up you know, little marks to notate how many outs were taking place in the inning, etc. And you know, people would go as you can see in the the photograph here and just stand on a street corner and watch this mostly immobile thing for hours until a little piece would move, right? But I think this actually might resonate with some of our experiences with newer technologies in the 21st century. I know I'm guilty of you know, in a moment when I can't watch my team play or listen to a radio broadcast, I'll have my phone up with like the live score usually on the Google app like and just staring at it until I get any sort of update like crossing my fingers that my team is going to score. So similar maybe to the playograph, a 21st century version of that. The of course first truly disruptive technological innovation in media was radio. And this this is a story of the 1920s. So the golden era of radio coincides with the golden era of baseball in the United States. In 1920, KDKA in Pittsburgh was the first radio station to broadcast first presidential election results, which are kind of like a sporting event, right? [laughter] Warren Harding defeated James Cox to become the next American president. And then on July 2nd, 1921, the Jack Dempsey-Georges Carpentier boxing match was the first broadcast live on radio. So we have our first live sports radio broadcast. Only a month after that, Harold Arlin, who was an electrical engineer for Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, delivered the first play-by-play radio broadcast of a baseball game over the Westinghouse company's KDKA in Pittsburgh. It was the first commercial radio station in the United States. He sat in a box behind home plate at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field. Remember, nobody had ever done this before. So he's kind of just making it up. And KDKA's powerful signal was so strong, it reached all the way across the Atlantic to England. The next day he called a Davis Cup match between Great Britain and Australia. And this was of course the first tennis event broadcasted on radio. There were five licensed radio stations in the United States in 1921. Only 3 years later, there were more than 500. And this dynamic of course is taking place all around the world. Sport really drives content on radio. And in a place like the United States where baseball is king during this era, it's baseball and sports radio that become a really important portion of the content of radio broadcasting. And sports radio becomes ubiquitous. Sports radio broadcasters, household names with familiar voices. Believe it or not, this is Ronald Reagan, of course before he goes on to become the United States president in the 1980s, he starts his career as a sports broadcaster on radio in Iowa. And you know, later on um, during his time as governor of California, while he's running for president, during his presidency, his nickname becomes the Great Communicator. And much of that ability to communicate, and also Americans hearing his voice all the time and trusting him, it it is that he's an actor, but it's more so that he's ubiquitous on radio stations across the the country. He, um, you know, in this early period, sometimes the technology fails. And so, they're getting, um, you know, telegraphed, um, uh, ticker tape information coming in to to then be able to call games. They're not watching anything, of course. Um, and he oftentimes would be in situations where that that information stream would get cut off. And there's a couple of notorious, um, very famous examples where he would just make stuff up. And once while he was waiting for that ticker tape to keep coming in, he called a series of foul balls in a row and set the record without knowing it for the number of foul balls hit during one player's at bat. Um, but of course, it was all made up. So, some funny stories around that. Television is the game changer. And football, American football in particular, seemed to be a perfect fit. You know, a lot of theories around why soccer takes so long to take off in the United States is the story of television. Because it was kind of understood that soccer didn't work as well with television, whereas American football fit almost perfectly. It was almost like the sport was invented for it, though of course, it wasn't, because it was invented many decades before television was, um, discovered and invented. But if if radio and baseball were a match made in heaven, television and American football were, at least in the United States. It took a while, though, for team and league officials to recognize the opportunity. They're really reluctant about media. They're worried about fans no longer coming to their stadiums and it killing off their sport. But sport, and football in particular, recognizes that they need to adapt to the needs and interests of television networks. We're talking a lot about people who are entrepreneurial in spirit. I think sport is one industrial space that attracts a lot of entrepreneurial, innovative people. Um, ABC [clears throat] in the United States is really the broadcasting network that has to innovate, because they are the the third man out. So, CBS and NBC are the powerhouses of American broadcasting during this time. If ABC wants to compete, they've got to think outside of the box. And sport becomes a leverage point for them to do precisely that. They launch ABC's Wide World of Sports in the 1960s, and it becomes a cultural phenomenon for many, many decades. And sport is really what helps ABC join the other two to form a big three. The joke during this time period was that ABC stood for Almost Broadcasting Network. In other words, like there was no way they were going to be able to catch up to NBC and CBS, but they do, and sport becomes kind of a stepping stone for, um, not just in this industry, but many others, too. And a similar dynamic plays out with Fox in the US, um, where Fox is now the fourth man out, and they have to think innovatively and differently, and sport is one of the ways in which they do that. So, the, uh, NFL, um, of course, you might be familiar with the Super Bowl, the kind of biggest sports event of the year in the United States. Um, and the first Super Bowl is played in 1967, though it's not called that. Um, we don't come up with the term Super Bowl until maybe the fourth or so of these. Um, but it's actually a football game that takes place almost a decade prior to this first Super Bowl. It's the 1958 NFL Championship when the Baltimore Colts are playing the New York Giants, and Johnny Unitas leads the team to come back after being down, scoring 24 unanswered points. This is what kind of captures the hearts and minds of Americans that football is their game. You know, baseball was king in this country for many, many decades, and it's this decade of the the, you know, late '50s into the 1960s that football surpasses baseball, and professional football, you know, ever since it's been the number one sport in the United States. But professional football until this period was well behind baseball, even behind um, college football, American college football, as far as the rankings of most popular sports. And so, it's television that enables the NFL to leapfrog and surpass those other sports industries in the US. Globally, the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City are the first broadcasted live in color to an international audience. This is hugely significant. There were 600 million global viewers of the Mexico City 1968 Olympic Games. And so, television, this golden era, um, of American football in the United States, of sport, um, [clears throat] kind of around the world, it sport kind of is elevated to become one of the most pop, you know, most important forms of popular culture because of television during these decades. Now, when we're talking about sport and we're talking about media, another kind of actor, player in this dynamic and relationship is governments. And the question being posed here is the relationship between media and sport a matter of public policy? The answer to that is yes in vir- virtually every country in the world. In the United States, um, this this has a long history, and Congress passes the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. Um, you know, we have antitrust laws in the United States that prevent industries from forming monopolies, and acting like monopolies. And the the rationale behind this is to protect consumers, um, workers and consumers. And so, what the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 does is it grants an antitrust exemption to professional sports leagues so that they can pool and package media rights as a single unit to broadcasters. You need an exemption to act in that way, because it it's technically like leagues are acting like monopolies, because each of the various franchises or teams within a league, it if we were to follow antitrust laws, they would be enabled to compete in the market and sell their media rights kind of competitively against each other. Um, so you have to go to your government to ask for protections to be able to pool and package and sell them as a single unit. Um, what's really interesting about the sport Sports Broadcasting Act of '61, addition additionally to this, is that Congress was very incentivized to ensure that these professional leagues that were be- being given all this power were, um, pro- protective of the other forms of sports that were taking place in the United States. And because American football is king by this point in American history, they designate that Friday nights and Saturday nights, the want to protect high school football, Friday Night Lights, if you're familiar with, um, that phenomenon in the United States, and then college football on Saturdays. Now, that clock runs out, and so, the post season of the NFL can play on those days. What's interesting now is that college football has extended it its season with the college football playoff. And so, for the first time we have college football and pro football, um, competing for eyes on the same Fridays, um, once we get into December and January. Um, a lot of countries, and this is also included in the Sports Broadcasting Act in the United States, a lot of countries have, um, either national blackouts or local blackouts to incentivize fans of teams to continue to go to stadiums. Um, as things were getting sorted out in this relationship between television and sport, um, you know, sports owners really were concerned about the potential effects of fans no longer coming to stadiums. And television, being able to watch a game in the convenience of your own home, or maybe fans who enjoy a pub culture more than actually going to the stadium. And as ticket prices, um, you know, certainly a topic related to the men's World Cup that's coming this summer, as ticket prices continue to elevate and elevate and get more and more expensive, maybe it's a better option to be with your friends in a pub in kind of a more intimate setting, anyway. And [snorts] so, um, these blackouts mean that you can't do those things, because there is no broadcast of your team, and so you're going to have to go to the stadium and one thing we like to point out about the United States is it's much easier to watch English football in the US than it is in England because of the 3:00 p.m. blackout. And so, it's it's all of the games in that that key um time period, that the 3:00 game, that is preserved um to keep to keep football culture intact and not be disrupted by um whatever media interventions, you know, come along in the process. This wasn't always the case that sport was the most important form of media. That is a later story. Um in the United States, um you know, we had a whole slew of programming that was much more popular and and brought in more eyes than sport. And so, on any given week, if you looked at Nielsen ratings, you'd see comedy shows like Seinfeld, you'd see dramas like ER bringing in, you know, 20 million viewers. There is no show of that nature that brings in and aggregates that that many viewers in in a single moment when it's, you know, being broadcasted for the first time. Um and so, on these lists, like on this one here, you see what two sporting events. So, two out of the top 20. Um And here is the top 100 most watched US broadcasts of 2024. So, so the flags being Oh, yeah, '24 was a a an election year. So, again, kind of like sport, my team versus your team. Um but it's really only live events that aggregate these gigantic audiences now. And if we look at a year that is not an election year in the United States, you see just the extent to which football is king. And so, it isn't just the king of all sports, it's the king of all live audience broadcasts in the United States and telecasts. So, when we use that term, instead, we're including various forms of media. And it's it's really these disruptions um introduced by media tech companies, um Netflix being kind of the the the big innovator of that this new generation of um delivering media. And so, um you know, if if you or I um were looking for something to watch tonight and you're like, you know what, I never watched Breaking Bad. I think I've maybe that'll be the series I start tonight and that'll give me something to watch, you know, for however many seasons it was on. I'm more likely to go back and watch, you know, a show that had that I'd never watched but was part of the popular culture in the time that it had been released. I'm more likely to watch that than go back and stream like the UEFA >> [laughter] >> um Euros final between Spain and Germany from the same year that Breaking Bad came out. So, what elevates sport as um a form of media and its ability to aggregate audiences is that it's kind of the last form of media that that does for live events. Um so, it's elevated the value of sport to these media companies now in a way that sport was vying to be part of the media entertainment enterprise, now media entertainment enterprises understand sport is the way you can aggregate large audiences and it's really only the last remaining way to do so um because of the kind of fracturing of audiences that the the kind of disruption of streaming has introduced. So, here are all of the ways and this list will continue to grow as we get more new innovative kind of media technologies. But, you know, over time, we have distribution of live sport via broadcast, cable, um internet, digital mobile, streaming services, proprietary apps like the leagues themselves um are now starting to put out their own content, right? And so, they're kind of eliminating the middleman. What you could buy a league pass either for the entirety of the league or more likely the team that you follow to be able to watch your team regardless of where it's being streamed or broadcasted. Um and kind of a repackaging of these variety of things through skinny bundles. So, we we've witnessed and are continuing to experience a media transition from broadcast to cable. And look at these numbers. I mean, the collapse of some of these industries has has been pretty swift. Um in 2010, there were 105 million households subscribing to cable TV in the United States. By 2024, the number was below 50 million. So, people are cutting their cords as we see in the image here. >> [laughter] >> Um so, Netflix is the big disruptive innovator when it comes to those scripted programs, right? The the um Uh not just scripted, of course, we have like documentary series and those sorts of things, too. But, writers' rooms of people working on product that is not just setting up a camera of and witnessing something that's taking place. And so, Net- Netflix and then, you know, other kind of competitors or some of the broadcast networks that recognize to stay alive, they're going to need to develop their own streaming platforms. This is what disrupts that old formula of the networks, the traditional broadcast networks on linear TV developing this content that would aggregate audiences where like on a Thursday night, everyone would rush home to watch the series of programming on whatever network. Um I think Thursday nights were NBC. And then, the next morning at work around the water cooler would be able to dis- discuss that content. We We do that about sports still, of course, but we don't with the TV programming um or the the short kind of film series that are cut into multiple parts that we watch on these very HBO and other streaming platforms. YouTube is another big player here um because of like user-generated content um is it it's debated whether or not it's considered to be a form of media, also. But, the fact that we have kind of the traditional um broadcast networks but also the leagues themselves being the users generating content via YouTube now, um you know, YouTube also like bidding for rights to air sporting events, um um they're they're a player here, too. And so, we see these kind of boundaries of who's providing sport collapsing um and that's captured here. So, now Nielsen ratings aren't just linear TV, they're um you know, broadcast represents less less than 20% of um the the way in which a typical American is consuming media content um today. Uh cable has gone down to 22% and streaming has overtaken. Um so, this is, you know, the average person consumes um typically um in these percentages from the various forms of media. Comcast and Disney in the United States are multimedia conglomerates that include pretty much every one of the various parts of the different realms of the media pie of the previous slide. And they typically also have movie production houses, too. Um and so, you know, we could think of media and sport as competing with the user- user-generated content and, you know, we're still kind of trying to figure out what the market even is these days. Um you know, all these spaces become balkanized and sport is really the last remaining thing that can aggregate mass audiences. Um you know, there were 1.5 billion viewers around the world of the um last men's World Cup final in 2022 when um France and Argentina played. There's nothing else that pulls in 1.5 billion viewers globally. Um And it it's really also to the point now that sport is the only thing holding traditional linear television together. These networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC in the US, um and now streaming providers like Netflix and Apple, you know, everyone understands that if you're going to stay um a lucrative business or even remain in business, you have to buy into sport. And from the sports leagues' perspective, they get to slice up that pie of their content and sell as many pieces as possible to as many buyers to maximize their revenues. And in the United States, you really need to have a piece of the NFL to stay alive at this point. And that's why the NFL will sell pieces and parts to so many different linear TV networks, broadcast companies, streaming services, and even user-generated content. So, YouTube has been um broadcasting um the the Brazil game actually was was on YouTube. Everyone is kind of terrified of YouTube because of their deep pockets because YouTube's parent company is Google. It's a Google project. And additionally, this user-created content poses some questions for um kind of the more traditional broadcast companies because of the leagues becoming the users creating the content. And they could cut out man and sell to consumers directly. Um and you know, we see this with leagues selling um passes. And usually they're they're team specific. What's also interesting with streaming and user-generated content is that they're typically not constrained by national boundaries. Rights are typically sold at a country-by-country auction, but now you could do a deal with a single global provider. The challenge here is the timing of the contracts coming up for renewal. Like if you have a contract with a company in one country and a different contract with a different company in another country, you know, one contract might run through 2030. Another might run through 2034. And if you're trying to negotiate a single global rights deal, the timing of those previous contracts running out might get kind of expensive for you because you're going to have to buy out the length of the contract if you want to line these things up and get them done more quickly. So, the streaming services were really kind of many of them um kind of took pride in not having to be dependent on sport um to to stay in business. And yet they would um see that they did very well when they produced sports documentaries. The kind of glossy, polished um you know, documentary series of being embedded with the team during a season. Um in the All or Nothing Nothing series, I may watch the Manchester City one with Pep Guardiola um which felt very edited and there were certain things that they couldn't show, of course. So, it almost is like they were doing um comms and promotions for the club themselves. And in the United States, The Last Dance looking at Michael Jordan's legacy in the 1990s Bulls. I grew up in the '90s in Chicago, so this is like time traveling back to my childhood. So, this was kind of um the gateway drug for streaming services to understand, "Ooh, actually, maybe we could make a ton of money if we decided to go all in with the sports thing and get new subscribers." So, Formula 1 um kind of became Excuse me. Sorry, 1 second. Um the the sport that, you know, everyone wanted, especially if you were trying to sign up new subscribers in more countries around the world. Getting the rights to Formula 1 um was everything. And um in the United States, you know, the United States for a long time, um FIFA and people in the business of soccer looked to the United States, looked at the size and the the kind of wealth of the country and were like, "How do we get Americans into soccer? That's a market that we need to engage." Similarly with Formula 1. And the Drive to Survive series is what really turned so many Americans on to Formula 1 and its awesomeness. And that phenomenon didn't just happen in the US. Drive to Survive really launched Formula 1, which was already popular, to the next level. In the United States, um starting in 2026, Apple has the rights to Formula 1. And speaking of Apple, Apple was um you know, one of these streaming companies that didn't see any value in having sport. But really this show Ted Lasso, um which, you know, couldn't have been an American sport um if they wanted to sell subscriptions to Apple TV worldwide, it needed to be a sport that the world watched and loved. And that sport is soccer. So, you have kind of like American Hollywood stars who um are set in the context of English football. And that recipe really made the show financially successful and helped Apple sell new subscriptions around the world. And this was their kind of stepping stone to signing Leo Messi. Now, I'm talking about Apple TV signing Leo Messi because that's kind of what happened. If you remember, Messi was deciding between um you know, after his Barcelona days, deciding between going to play in the Saudi league or going to play in MLS. And everybody didn't really understand why MLS was a uh desirable place for Messi to go to next. Um it's kind of like what happened with David Beckham, where, you know, it wasn't just that he was going to go play in LA. He was promised all of these additional things like ownership of a future MLS team, which he now has in Miami. And so, they're they're kind of replicating that, but in a new way with the kind of new media technologies that exist. Um Messi gets paid by Apple TV in addition to being paid by his MLS club. And the thinking here was, you know, it's almost like a Hollywood studio signing their star. Um Apple TV signed their star so that there would be global interest in watching Messi play in the MLS. So, this was you know, what we've seen so many times in different parts of the sports industry. This is what Nike did with Michael Jordan. They sign him on, they give him an Air Jordan brand, and Michael Jordan gets a percentage of every single pair of Air Jordans sold. That's what Messi gets when Apple TV sells subscriptions. Now, Netflix, last man standing from the streaming services, finally kind of gives in and starts broadcasting sports. Um what made this unprecedented was that I remembered I needed to click again. Global streaming. So, you know, I think we're all aware that there are more people in the United States than outside the United States that watch NFL football, right? When when we look at other sports, um there are way more people watching English football, for example, outside England than inside England, right? And and the Premier League sells media rights in almost every single country of the world save like three or four. That is not the case with the NFL. And so, what's distinctive and innovative about the NFL Christmas Day games um from a year ago was that they were global rights. And so, this game was suddenly available to 283 million subscribers in 190 countries. That had never happened before. And the NFL, um you know, this this lucrative piece of content that now every form of media wants, the NFL understands that if if they want to expand their market, the market is saturated in the United States. Most popular sport in the US. Everybody watches NFL football. Um you know, 113 million people watched inside the United States um the Super Bowl that came just a couple of months after that Qatar 2022 um World Cup final. Um only half that number watched the NFL outside the United States. So, if the NFL wants to expand its market and also its its wealth, its finances, it needs to grow audiences outside the US. That's why we're seeing so many NFL games being played in other parts of the world now. It's not that they want more people around the world playing American football. It's that they want more people watching it so that they can sell more lucrative media rights to a global audience and not just in the US. Also unprecedented, the rights to the FIFA Women's World Cup in '27 and also '31 um in the United States are going to Netflix. And so, what will be interesting is what Netflix does with this because it isn't just the games themselves. People are very excited about what's called the shoulder programming content. In other words, the documentary series. Or are they going to be embedded with one of these teams? Are they going to give shows to some of these star players? It's going to be really interesting to see what Netflix does with this. And then also, if they are aggressively trying to buy the rights in many, many more countries, which I'm kind of crossing my fingers that they are cuz it'll be an interesting thing to track and follow. >> [cough] [clears throat] >> So, the São Paulo game, um you know, we had our second NFL game in Brazil this past fall, and this one was on YouTube, which is unprecedented. Um and here is um it it's a record number of countries in which NFL games will be played in this upcoming 2026 season. Um again, this isn't about getting more kids playing American football. It's about getting more people who are interested in following and watching the game so that the NFL can increase the price of the media rights that they're selling in various parts of the world. >> [clears throat] >> I should also say that um it's not just professional NFL football. Our ASU Sun Devil team, our football team is playing in Wembley. It'll be the first college football game in England um on September 19th this fall. We're playing the University of Kansas. And um you know, Wembley um is the national stadium of England. In other words, it's reserved for the national team. There are no clubs that play in Wembley. But the NFL has been coming to Wembley for many years, and now we see um promoters um pitching American college football teams on doing the same thing and replicating that same thing there. Now, from the perspective of Sun Devil Athletics and Arizona State University, you know, and as from my perspective as an educator, for me, this is an educational opportunity as much as it is a business opportunity. Um I think it's wonderful for our students who play football to have this experience of going and traveling and playing in a different country. But also like our traveling fans to go and experience things and an American sport being played in a different country. But also I think this game will attract a lot of expats. But again, if we're thinking about the business of sport, it is a media story. And so, of course, we're thinking about broadcasting rights and how great and interesting this will look on TV for an American college football game to be played in the national stadium um England. Um really quick to close um this slide about Sunderland 'Til I Die. If you haven't watched this documentary series, it is phenomenally done. But the reason I'm telling you about Sunderland 'Til I Die is it is the show that inspired Rob McElhenney um to call up his friend Ryan Reyn- Ryan Reynolds and say, "Hey, let's make a show about soccer." So, the idea first was to make a show about soccer. What came after that was figuring out which club to purchase. And so, it's almost like sport media has become sport and sport has become media. So, if this story of the 20th century was the mediafication of sport, sport figuring out how to be a media entertainment product and being successful at that, they were so successful that by the 21st century, media is now going through a process of becoming sport. In other words, like you know, it it it's not this the sport story and the running of a team, it's a we're going to make a show and now we're going to figure out how to run a team. And that is really unprecedented. And you know, Wrexham is a success story. Um both I would say in what they've given back to the local community. Um this is a community that that now has a very robust tourism industry. But also the success on the pitch. And so, Wrexham, you know, went through three successive promotions. They're playing in the championship. They're on the cusp of making the playoff um cuz the third slot to go up to the Premier League involves having to play in a four-team tournament. They're sitting right on the edge of qualifying to make that tournament to try to play for the right to play in the Premier League next year. And that would be an unprecedented fourth promotion. Um and now they're replicating or they have been. I've watched this. It already exists out in the world. Um they're they're replicating that formula, right? Where we have media stars who've purchased um into teams so that they can build a show around that club. And so, Necaxa in Mexico um with Eva Longoria, who's friends with Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, they're doing the same thing in the Mexican League now. And so, that that concludes my comments. I look forward to getting some questions for you and and you know, also please email me anytime. My email address is victoria.jackson@asu.edu. Again, check out the Great Game Lab website. It's greatgamelab.asu.edu. We have a lot of really fun content on on there as well. Thanks, Dr. Jackson, for that lecture. Let me go ahead and replace this and we'll get Excellent. And friendly reminder, we do have a Q&A piece to this presentation. Feel free to send any questions in and we'll get to as many as possible. Before we begin the Q&A, I do have a couple things to show you. First is this QR code for feedback for how you think today's webinar went. It's four short questions, completely anonymous, and we'd love to hear what you have to say about today's session, but also about future topics that you might be interested in hearing. As most of you guys are aware, once you finish this webinar, if you signed up using your institutional email address, you should receive a badge. If you don't receive a badge or you have any questions, feel free to reach out to this email or this WhatsApp number and we can help you get those. If you are in a classroom, your professor will send us your roster and you should also receive a badge as well. We are excited to announce poweredby.asu.edu. This will be the main hub for all things powered by ASU, including our wonderful masterclass series. If you scan this QR code, you should be able to see upcoming masterclasses, but also watch past masterclasses. As this is the last masterclass of the semester, we do have a short preview. So, preview for fall 2026, how robots find their way, mapping and navigation in unknown environments. We hope to see you join us on September 8th. You should see the registration open up in early August or late July. But with that, we will go ahead and get started with our Q&A. If you didn't get these, I'm going to go through them. We'll cycle through them. So, don't worry at all. First question today is from Indonesia. They have a strong curiosity about how the media frames sports when it comes to narrating the loser. Um does it relate to anything economical or political interest of the media? And to what extent is it related to country's soft power? What an interesting question. You know, it's not necessarily something that I've thought about, but you are tapping into something that I find really fascinating mostly from my experiences as an elite athlete. I'm always finding myself impressed by broadcasters' ability to try to stay neutral and objective in the ways that they're calling the the games or the matches that they're watching. I think things get interesting when we're looking at the broadcast of sporting events involving national team um competition. [clears throat] And um I always am more likely to find ways to watch global feeds than I am um you know, particular other country big country streams because you do seem to have more of that awareness of the audience being from the world than from a particular place. That said, like the patriotism of broadcasts of national team competition um is something that I am understanding of. Um and if anything, you know, if it is a country where things have become pretty polarized and divided, sport seems to be a rallying point in that regard. Um we've seen you know, in history points at which politics kind of try to to the point of not even kind of injecting themselves into sport, but taking over sport. Um and that is a little bit harder to stomach. Um particularly when it's a authoritarian states um kind of very transparently and explicitly trying to leverage that power of sport. When it comes to narratives around losers, um I do think it's interesting that we see it's almost the audience that is reading things on to the things that broadcasters are saying and interpreting that call in a way [clears throat] that aligns with the way they see a competition as being like good versus evil or something like that. So, I'm thinking about the call by a Sun Devil um Al Michaels of the Miracle on Ice in um you know, this iconic from the US perspective hockey game um in the semifinals of the 1980 Olympic Games during you know, a a heightened point of the Cold War. And Al Michaels calls that game in a way that is not like good versus evil. But you know, the the kind of unexpected from the perspective of the Americans goal to win that game and Al Michaels saying, "Do you believe in miracles?" and then pausing dramatically and then shouting, "Yes!" has been kind of taken to also belie kind of a broader Cold War context. And so, for the losers in that, the Soviets, I I assign an article in my class that that kind of shows the ways in which the Soviets and Americans on the ice were we're respectful of each other and the narrative from the fan perspective was the opposite, right? These are like the bad guys and they despised the fact that they lost to these upstart amateur Americans. What's really funny about the Miracle on Ice phenomenon um is that there's an exact same and in the movie um there's a movie of it that you know all of my students have watched it seems and they've kind of taken and run with the kind of broader Cold War of it all. There's an the the exact same film but from the Russian perspective about basketball um >> [clears throat] >> it the American translation is going vertical about the 1972 Olympic final in basketball when the Soviet Union defeats the Americans. And so it's like the reverse of all of these narratives, right? The the underdog story. Everybody wants to be an underdog and they beat the dominant powerful American team um and so it's it's really funny that we see these from both perspectives. But that that question is really interesting and I'm going to be thinking about it for a long time. And it's probably going to frame the way I watch some of these World Cup matches this summer. Well, thank you for that. And thank you for the great questions, too. Another question uh we have a faculty member from the sports marketing uh in Ecuador. What do you think of WWE arriving to Netflix? Are you familiar with that? I mean yeah, WWE is essentially an interesting phenomenon because it collapses this boundary between unscripted and scripted um and also like sport and entertainment. Um it and it it it's also for those of us who live in a world in which we don't want to think about, you know, match fixing or these sorts of things um kind of destroying our love of sports. Like if ever there was something that is probably that um cuz I don't want to offend anybody depending on the ways in which they enjoy and consume um professional wrestling. Um yeah, I mean I I wish I knew more about WWE um I I do think it's it is an example of kind of entertainment and innovation and entrepreneurial spirit kind of all baked into one. Um but it's clearly something that um all these various forms of media understand is a good product that consumers want. And so if that is where they're going to make their money in a kind of very cutthroat environment, um that's where they're going to make their money. And it's a global phenomenon, too. Um and so again, if if you are someone who understands if you want to maximize your media rights in your market, you're going to have to go global and that that's what WWE has become. Excellent. Thank you for that. Another question, how does sports betting uh how has sports betting affected the integrity of sports? Yeah, well, I mean I just mentioned that I'm someone who likes to live in a world in which I think match fit I'm going to just tell myself match fixing doesn't exist. Sports betting um I just read a an excellent book that I highly recommend. It just came out. It's by Danny Funt and the title um conveys how he feels about it after researching it and exploring it for many years in the research and writing of this book. The title is everybody loses. And so um yeah, I um you know, sports betting the one thing I'm often telling folks in the United States is we are not inventing the wheel here. Like sports betting has been around for a very long time in many parts of the world. If anything, the United States is now entering the game late um but not learning the lessons that have been learned in other places. That's a big takeaway of Danny Funt's book. Um I'm so very troubled by sports betting. I worry most cuz my heart is always with athletes um that it inflicts way too many harms on athletes um the mental health issues that athletes face when, you know, if somebody has placed a prop bet on them and they didn't do the thing that that person that wagered a lot of money on them doing, you know, and it might be something really obscure that doesn't relate at all to the outcome of the game and then they receive a ton of hate and death threats and just awful hostility in their direct messages on social media platforms. Like the toll that all of this takes on athletes um is a terrible thing. Like I would love for there not to be prop betting. Um but in the grand scheme of things related to the integrity of sport um I I do have confidence and faith in the people who work in sports industries to do whatever it takes to keep the integrity of the game intact. That said, what troubles me is when they engage in partnerships with sports betting companies um when me media, you know, I was just talking about how sport became media and media became sport. I worry about media becoming sports betting because that's an industry that's now seeing a new lifeline through the money's from sports betting companies. Um yeah, it's a big hot mess um and worthy of a book-length of um reflection. So I do very much recommend Danny Funt's book Everybody Loses. And he does a good job of playing the US story that's happened more recently in a global context. Excellent. Thank you for that. All right. So we are at time but I'm going to try to see if I can find a a way to combine all of these other questions that we have. They're so great and we appreciate you guys sending them. Um so I'll use this one as the base. So you mentioned major leagues like NFL rely on broadcasting deals and subscriptions in this era. How does this compare to combat slash professional fighting like the UFC? Uh and then looking at a more cuz they they usually went the pay-per-view route. Looking at a more now with their new deal with Paramount, um is this financially viable? Uh especially given the um initial events that haven't been as big of a success as they thought. Oh, I think I think that the market is there. And so um you know, I do think the origin of this sort of programming being on pay-per-view wasn't necessarily that there was less of a market. It's that traditional companies placed a value judgment on that content and decided that they didn't want it. Um but because of that popularity and because of you know, business dynamics, like they understand that they have to um be vying for, bidding on, and hopefully winning that content as well. Because there's been such a Balkanization and a fracturing of audience in other spaces that even if sport isn't as you know, if if um combat sports aren't as popular as other sports, they're going to be much more popular and aggregate larger audiences than other forms of media. So I think comparing it not necessarily with other sports but with the other forms of media entertainment that those companies are investing in and especially if the the price tag on producing the content is low that's when you know it's a good business decision and I think that's what combat sports provide. Well, excellent. And thank you, thank you, thank you, Dr. Jackson. This whole series we've really appreciated it and I I mean personally I found out so much and it's so interesting. And thank you to everybody who has been able to join us. As I said before this is the last master class of the semester. So we appreciate y'all joining us. Looking to fall 2026, September 8th should be our next master class. And we're going to look at a more technological approach. Do it try to do a series with that. But yeah, thank you guys so much for being here today and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Bye, y'all.