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Selling the Game: How Sky, ESPN, and Streaming Wars Changed Sport Forever
Paperback
Business GeneralSports GeneralGeneral World History
Publisher Price: $24.99
ISBN13: 9781923570399
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 9 2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.
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.
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.
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.
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