Prof. Garry Whannel
Emeritus Professor of Media Cultures, University of Bedfordshire, UK
Garry Whannel is a writer, and researcher, specialising in media sport, culture and politics. He has written or co-written several books including Understanding the Olympics, 2013, 2016, 2020) Culture Politics and Sport: Blowing The Whistle Revisited, (2008); Media Sport Stars, Masculinities and Moralities (2002); and Fields in Vision: Television Sport and Cultural Transformation (1992). He has lived in central London for many years, cooks, writes plays, and plays piano, clarinet and guitar, all badly.
Email: garry.whannel@me.com
Blog: Garry Whannel Works and Plans (WordPress)
We typically think of television as being a domestic medium. Sport is the exception. Screen sport invites and enables a wide range of practices of consumption. No-one goes to a local bar to watch a soap opera or a crime series or a documentary – that is why there are no “soap opera” bars. The appeal of sport, its gender specificities, its basis in the communal idea of the crowd, its live immediacy, its spectacular nature – ideal on a big screen – all these elements combined together to produce the sports bar. Nowadays, of course with the ubiquity of public large screens, in airports, hotels, shopping malls, city squares, opportunities to view top level live sport are numerous and diverse.
This ubiquity, in turn, combines with the typical nature of modern urban life – busy, rushed, full of movement and saturated with information. Consequently, if one is a sports fan, but also has a life outside sports viewing, viewing moments can become fragmentary. People may catch bits of football matches in shop windows, motorway service stations, whist waiting for a train, killing time at an airport, or a shopping centre.
There are arguably two poles of viewing experience. The first typified by the sports bar or similar public space, can involve committed fans of one side gathering together, the need to arrive early to guarantee a seat, watching with passionate intensity, from build-up to post-mortem. This intensity of experience has given rise to the “watch party” where a group of people gather in a space, public or private, where the key ingredients are a very large screen and big speakers; a source of alcoholic drink, nibbles, and adequate space to celebrate.
The second is harder to sketch precisely because it tends to be smaller scale, more individual. It consists precisely of all the brief, fleeting, and fragmented moments when bits of a match may be observed. I have heard many people recount, in regard to the World Cup 2026, that there were far too many games to watch them all, so they have chosen a few key ones. Yet, consistently, they experience brief glimpses of others (I saw the first half hour, the second half; I turned off when it went into extra time; I turned on when it went to extra time; I only saw the highlights; I was home in time for the last 10 minutes).
In the UK, this was particularly striking. The major sport event viewing experience – live multiple cameras, action replay, slow motion, viewed on large screens, is customarily referred to as better than being there, and indeed, in many ways, so it is. However, watching a tournament staged across three countries (one, the USA, almost the size of Europe), and four time zones, relayed by two broadcasters one with a live studio in Brooklyn, NY and the other based in Salford, Lancashire, it is pertinent to respond, “better than being where?”
The matches were dispersed across space and time. In British Summer Time, games were mostly broadcast at start times between 17:00 and 02:00 the next day. BBC under budgetary pressure, elected to have its main studio in Salford, Lancashire, where the BBC Sports Department is based. ITV hired premises in Brooklyn with a New York skyline. The ITV setup signified “being there”, but as it was not actually attached to any of the venues, was it really any more or less “there” than Salford?
There was ample chance to experience the World Cup in immersive and complete forms – many venues set up big screens and beer gardens to facilitate this; indeed Prime Minister Keir Starmer even decreed that pubs could stay open till 5:00am, for the night that England’s game against Mexico kicked off in the Azteca Stadium, at 01:00am British Summer Time.
I am guessing, though, that those who saw every minute of all 104 games, were very much in the minority, and that the majority of viewers had a fragmentary mode of consuming the World Cup – seeing the whole of some games, significant parts (the second half, extra time) of others, while glimpsing short bits of yet others. A number of people have reported to me that after deciding NOT to watch England v Mexico (01:00BST) they mysteriously woke at some point between 01:00 and 04:00. Some watched the rest, some watched just a bit, some glanced at the score and then returned to bed and sleep. Some were confused at the schedule – the match was delayed by around 55 minutes by a storm. Waking and needing the toilet, I picked up my phone to read in quick succession, about a foul, a VAR consultation, an England red card, and a third England goal. Calculating that with 30 minutes to go, and a two goal margin, England could probably hold on. I went back to sleep.
My point is that to understand major television sport spectacle, we need new models of audience behaviour that takes into account these diverse and fragmentary modes of consuming the spectacle. Even in the case of the final, supposedly the culminatory moment when, in hyberbolic terms, “the whole world is watching”, I know several people who turned off and went to bed long before the end.
