CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study
The history of sports on television can be traced back to an informal scrimmage between members of the Philadelphia Eagles in 1934, which was used to demonstrate the world’s first electronic television system. Five years later, the first professional football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Brooklyn Dodgers was broadcast to about 1,000 television sets (Cressman & Swenson, 2007). As television became more popular in the 1950s, the National Football League (NFL) quickly realized the opportunity for revenue and began selling broadcasting rights to a television network called DuMont. It was CBS however, that broadcasted the first full EPL (English Premier League) season in 1992 (Cressman & Swenson, 2007). The industry has since grown such that sports fans now have 24-hr access to sports entertainment through a wide variety of media outlets, where television now faces substantial competition from Internet Web sites.
Television broadcasts have long been the primary source of sports entertainment short of attending the events in person. For example, the average viewership of NFL regular season games on ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX has increased from 15.8 million in 2002 to 16.6 million in 2008 according to the NFL and Nielsen Media Research. More specific to primetime Sunday night football on NBC, the 2008 Nielsen ratings reveal that the number of viewers ranged from approximately 11 million to 23 million per game. In 2008, mega events such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics attracted over 90 and 30 million viewers respectively at different points during their broadcasts. Furthermore, FOX Saturday Baseball attracted an average of 3.8 million viewers each Saturday in the 2007 season.
In the UK, the social practice of betting has been subject to varying degrees of legislative control, reaching what some have seen as a ‘high water mark’ in 1906. From the 1906 Street Betting Act to the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act, betting was essentially an underground activity and one subject to significant (if evadable) punishment. The 1960 legislation set a new direction that saw greater toleration of betting in Britain, and introduced high street betting shops. Between 1960 and the advent of the National Lottery Act in 1993, betting largely operated on the principle of ‘unstimulated demand’. However, in 2005, the New Labour administration swept this paternalism away, via the 2005 Betting Act, which significantly liberalized betting laws, endorsed (through regulation) online betting and permitted betting companies to run television adverts. In an era of globalization, these policy shifts in the UK have broader consequences than those traditionally associated with the territorially bound governance of states, and have contributed to the ‘convergence of a global passion for sport and a global passion for betting’. This convergence has received insufficient attention in the public health literature, especially in the UK, and is particularly visible in football contexts.
Amongst the most visible partnerships that betting companies have entered into in the UK since the 2005 Act, have been with clubs in the English Premier League (EPL). The EPL is an important export for the UK economy with broadcasters paying subscriptions to the EPL for the right to show matches and highlights across 225 territories. The EPL claims that during the 2013/2014 season, 2.3 billion fans were engaged in the competition for the full 10 months of its duration and in the 2014/2015 season, that it reached an audience of 3 billion in-home viewers. The current television deal saw Sky Sports and BT Sport pay £5.136 billion for broadcast rights between 2016 and 2019. It is clear, therefore, that the EPL can be a significant global marketing vehicle for any industry, whether through shirt sponsorship, advertising hoardings, league sponsorship or stadium sponsorship. In recent years, the betting industry has made use of this marketing vehicle through a range of sponsorship deals with EPL clubs. The industry has also made significant inroads within the wider English Football League, with one betting company sponsoring the second, third and fourth-tier leagues in England. In an effort to keep up with the competition, television networks such as CBS and ESPN have also responded to the seemingly endless desire for up-to-date player information by incorporating “betting updates” into their TV sports news coverage. A survey conducted by the FSTA appears to have helped justify these network’s actions revealing that “55 percent of those surveyed say that they watch more sports on television because of their involvement in sports betting leagues,” suggesting that sports betting and television broadcasts are complements (Prescott, 2006)