{"id":1181,"date":"2014-07-11T21:52:04","date_gmt":"2014-07-11T19:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=1181"},"modified":"2014-07-11T22:14:58","modified_gmt":"2014-07-11T20:14:58","slug":"world-cup-round-ball-square-eyes-and-hungering-to-excess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/world-cup-round-ball-square-eyes-and-hungering-to-excess\/","title":{"rendered":"World Cup: round ball, square eyes and hungering to excess"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just before a critical World Cup game against Spain in Rio de Janeiro, scores of ticketless Chile fans\u00a0broke into<\/a>\u00a0the expensively rebuilt Maracana Stadium at its least secure point \u2013 the media centre.<\/p>\n

Surprised sports journalists got a close-up view of the frustrated invaders crashing through the glass doors and flimsy walls of their workspace, but quickly generated pictures and stories of this literally \u201cbreaking news\u201d to the outside world.<\/p>\n

This incident dramatically contrasts the scarce opportunity of attending the World Cup with the virtual impossibility of avoiding it via the media. About 75,000 people can fit into the Maracana, but FIFA, association football\u2019s world governing authority,\u00a0estimates<\/a>\u00a0that the 2014 World Cup will exceed the 3.2 billion audience reach of the preceding 2010 tournament in South Africa.<\/p>\n

\"neymar-copies\"<\/p>\n

A couple of young soccer fans, watch on a giant screen television Brazil play Cameroon in the soccer World Cup match, in Manaus, Brazil, Monday, June 23, 2014. Brazil’s Neymar scored twice in the first half to lead Brazil to a 4-1 win over Cameroon on Monday, helping the hosts secure a spot in the second round of the soccer World Cup. (AP Photo\/Martin Mejia)<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, most of us who like football are symbolically compelled to be big-match gatecrashers through the media centre.<\/p>\n

The media dominate mega sport events because of the obvious mismatch between stadium access and interest in what happens there. Scale and popularity make them prime-time news in their own right, much to the chagrin of those who couldn\u2019t tell Lionel Messi from a boutique label of Argentinean malbec.<\/p>\n

Sport permeates and sustains all media, but it was television that brought it vibrantly live into the lounge room and ensured massive \u2013 if incidental \u2013 attention to advertising and branding. For this reason, television corporations have been prepared to invest huge sums to secure broadcast rights \u2013\u00a0US$1.7 billion<\/a>\u00a0for Brazil 2014 alone.<\/p>\n

Broadcast television is under obvious threat from new media technologies, and it is live sport that has helped keep it alive. Television audiences may be fragmenting, but sport happens in the moment and so demands instant \u2013 and lucrative \u2013 congregation.<\/p>\n

However, singular dependency on a \u201cbox in the corner\u201d is long past. Brazil 2014, like the London 2012 Olympics before it, is a multi-screen experience enabled by the transition from analogue to digital media. This has been\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cthe first truly digital World Cup\u201d (by app performance company AppDynamics), but it is more convincingly the latest advance in\u00a0networked media sport<\/a>, which here draws football, fans, communication and commerce into an ever-more-intimate embrace.<\/p>\n

Before the first game kicked off in Sao Paulo, FIFA\u00a0concluded<\/a>\u00a0broadband and mobile rights deals alongside those for television. Therefore, with minimal effort, it is possible for those with the means to watch the action anytime, anywhere.<\/p>\n

Giant screens at public viewing sites in cities across the globe, flat-screen pub televisions, office computer monitors, laptops, tablets, smartphones and home stadiums mean that, whether in public or private space, we can always, in some sense, be \u201cat\u201d the World Cup.<\/p>\n

\"museumplein\"<\/p>\n

Museumplein in Amsterdam, where tens of thousands of Dutch supporters gathered to watch their national team.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the digital sport world means much more than proliferating options for watching football matches. Social media outlets provide multiple ways for football fans to converse with each other \u2013 and for the media, advertisers and sponsors to track the topics that exercise them.<\/p>\n

Operations like\u00a0BBC Trending<\/a>\u00a0monitor social media such as Twitter in order to tell the online audience what is running hot on social media and attempt to explain it all. The most noteworthy incident arising from Brazil 2014 so far, though, has not been spectacular goal-scoring by Australia\u2019s Tim Cahill or Colombia\u2019s James Rodriguez, but Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez biting his Italian opponent, Giorgio Chiellini\u2019s shoulder.<\/p>\n

Suarez\u2019s snacking on the job created a spectacular Twitter spike, with the term Suarez and hashtag #Suarez used 3.1 million times in a single day (according to BBC Trending). Soon, memes evoking Jaws, Dracula and The Silence of the Lambs\u00a0were in circulation<\/a>\u00a0along with sundry jokes involving blood-stained teeth. These spread in a now-familiar pattern from social media to mainstream reportage of what social media are saying, in turn to be commented on in social media in an ascending regenerative spiral of sport talk.<\/p>\n

Suarez may have eliminated England with two goals and followed up with a celebratory dressing-room video\u00a0post on YouTube<\/a>, but his scandalous behaviour on the pitch has attracted attention from far beyond the ranks of football followers.<\/p>\n

Blanket mainstream media coverage and social media chat have ensured that Suarez\u2019s contribution to World Cup posterity has been with incisor rather than instep. Perhaps it will ultimately define the visual memory of the event itself (like Zinedine Zidane\u2019s headbutt in the final of the Germany 2006 World Cup), sustained by the digital fossil record of slow-motion replays of the bite and the memes that it generated.<\/p>\n

In the lead-up to the Brazil World Cup, considerable media attention was paid to local opposition to it on grounds such as financial waste, corruption and oppression of the poor. As is usual with mega sport events, including the Beijing 2008 and Sochi 2014 Olympics, much of this political interest waned once journalists had regular sporting contests to cover.<\/p>\n

The Suarez affair has had the effect of breaking the spell, if temporarily. It has taken the focus off the games and onto debates about\u00a0acceptable and unacceptable conduct<\/a>\u00a0among footballers and the world game\u2019s post-colonial structures of discipline and power. Had Brazil been eliminated early, the resultant vacuum might have been filled by renewed protest and media interest in the condition of the country.<\/p>\n

Such are the uncertainties when so much professional and citizen media focus is applied to a single high-stakes sport competition in which national pride, sport governance authority and anxious corporate capital are deeply implicated. All the \u201cbig\u201d media are there, but they are seemingly as interested in trending patterns among the watchers in cyberspace as in player formations on the field of play.<\/p>\n

\n

Previously published by\u00a0theconversation.com\/au<\/a>\u00a0(Academic rigour, journalistic flair).<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Copyright \u00a9 David Rowe 2014<\/strong>
\nEmail:\u00a0d.rowe@uws.edu.au<\/a>
\nTwitter: @rowe_david
\nWebsite:\u00a0http:\/\/www.uws.edu.au\/ics\/people\/researchers\/david_rowe<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just before a critical World Cup game against Spain in Rio de Janeiro, scores of ticketless Chile fans\u00a0broke into\u00a0the expensively rebuilt Maracana Stadium at its least secure point \u2013 the media centre. Surprised sports journalists got a close-up view of the frustrated invaders crashing through the glass doors and flimsy walls of their workspace, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[27,26,20,22],"class_list":{"0":"post-1181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-okategoriserade","7":"tag-brazil-2014","8":"tag-fifa-world-cup","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-media"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-j3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}