Elsewhere in the global sporting landscape, the trajectory of sporting development and success increasingly refl ected the wider shifts in international economic and political power relations. While India and China, both enjoyed staging successful high-profi le sporting events in cricket and the Olympics, the sport of golf was being hit hard in the US by the credit crunch, but found itself thriving in the emerging economic powerhouse countries of Russia, India and China. What all of the above serve to illustrate is that since the publication of the fi rst edition of Power Play in 2000, sport has become even more a central component of mainstream popular culture as well as economic, political and public discourse. We would argue that a morecommercially focused, demand-led, 24/7 media system has helped to facilitate the seemingly insatiable appetite for particular sporting discourses. These trends are not without paradox. While sports – and football in particular – have entered the mainstream media lexicon, more and more live sport is only available on pay-TV platforms. Despite
this, events such as the free-to-air Olympics break through this barrier and are widely amplifi ed if they carry what the media defi ne as ‘good news stories’. More and more mainstream news coverage is devoted to carrying sporting stories and the stars that the media sport industries work so hard to create, and the media management and PR industries
work so hard to sustain and extract a commercial value from.