In 2011, New Zealand rugby fans erupted in celebration as the All Blacks narrowly defeated France to win the Rugby World Cup - the team's first title since New Zealand hosted the inaugural tournament in 1987. In the years between these victories, the sport of rugby has been radically transformed from its amateur roots to a professional, global entertainment 'product'. This book explores these developments and focuses initially on the New Zealand Rugby Union's key deals with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s. The new pay-per-view era has curtailed the traditional 'viewing rights' of rugby fans to have live, free-to-air access to All Blacks test matches on public television. Adidas, meanwhile, has relentlessly commodified aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity in pursuit of local and global markets while exploiting labour in developing countries. Escalating merchandise costs and ticket prices have, at the same time, pushed the sport further out of the reach of ordinary New Zealanders. All of these issues, however, have not gone uncontested, and the authors argue that rugby remains a contested terrain in the face of a new set of limits and pressures in the global economy.

This book examines the political debates over the access to live telecasts of sport in the digital broadcasting era. It outlines the broad theoretical debates, political positions and policy calculations over the provision of live, free-to-air telecasts of sport as a right of cultural citizenship. In so doing, the book provides a number of comparative case studies that explore these debates and issues in various global spaces.

This volume charts the debates over the provision of free-to-air telecasts of sport as a right of cultural citizenship, analyzing the complex economic, political, and sociological questions surrounding the increasingly tenuous ability of public broadcasters to compete for the broadcasting rights to the most popular and desirable sports and sporting events. Through comparative case studies, the contributors to this edited volume explore these issues in various locales across the globe.

When the Rogers Place arena opened in downtown Edmonton in September 2016, no amount of buzz could drown out the rumours of manipulation, secret deals, and corporate greed undergirding the project. Working with documentary evidence and original interviews, the authors present an absorbing account of the machinations that got the arena and the adjacent Ice District built, with a price tag of more than $600 million. The arena deal, they argue, established a costly public financing precedent that people across North America should watch closely, as many cities consider building sports facilities for professional teams or international competitions. Their analysis brings clarity and nuance to a case shrouded in secrecy and understood by few besides political and business insiders. Power Play tells a dramatic story about clashing priorities where sports, money, and municipal power meet.