Rediscovering Mediatization of Sport

Throughout the last decade, the term “mediatization” has attracted a great deal of attention among a growing number of scholars with an interest in the media and sport nexus (e.g., Frandsen, 2020; Hutchins, 2019; Wenner & Billings, 2017; Whannel, 2013). The term indicates “all the transformations of communicative and social processes (...) which follow from our increasing reliance on technologically and institutionally based processes of mediation” (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, pp. 3–4). When studying mediatization, authors generally focus on the proliferation of communication media and how this influences long-term social change and structural transformations in almost all sectors of modern societies. The aim of this special issue is to introduce mediatization as an analytical concept and phenomenon in relation to sport, and to illustrate how it is culturally contextualized and can therefore play out in different ways. Thus, our intention is to introduce more geographic and cultural diversity to our scholarly knowledge about dependencies between media and sport and to show the consequences these dependencies may have. Obviously, mediatization is not a new phenomenon, and there is a history of cooperation between some sports and the media which has influenced both parties involved. Media and cultural studies scholar Michael Real described the relationship between electronic media and spectator athletics as a “sacred union” (Real, 1975, p. 32)