Selling the Game

<p>For much of the 20th century sport on television was a shared public ritual-free-to-air broadcasts familiar voices and predictable schedules. Then came satellite dishes cable boxes and corporate ambition. Selling the Game tells the definitive story of how a handful of media giants transformed sports broadcasting into one of the most valuable-and fiercely contested-commodities in the world.</p><p></p><p>From Rupert Murdoch's audacious Sky gambit that rewrote English football's economics to ESPN's rise as the American sports behemoth with a grip on college football this book follows the money technology and strategies that turned fandom into a subscription business. The narrative spans the auction rooms where rights fees spiraled the broadcast trucks where new camera angles were born and the studios where personalities became brands.</p><p></p><p>As DAZN Amazon and Peacock disrupt the old order and fans juggle multiple subscriptions Selling the Game reveals the winners losers and cultural shifts of the past four decades. It is a story of innovation and excess of access gained and lost and of the globalisation that made a Manchester United shirt as familiar in Miami as in Manchester.</p><p></p><p>Drawing on landmark deals and industry-defining moments this is the authoritative account of the commercial revolution that changed not just how we watch sport but what sport has become.</p>