Digital spectacles, convergent realities: Deconstructing the sport-media-business nexus in an era of extended media

This article explores the transformative effects of digital media on the sport-media-business nexus. The approach is an analytical focus on a wide range of sports, examined from a theoretical framework that integrates institutional and organizational perspectives on mediatization with critical theories of hyperreality and the society of the spectacle. Based on a deconstruction of contemporary global sport, it is demonstrated that digital platforms are a major concern across the entire sporting landscape and that a new wave of mediatization is reconfiguring the nature of spectatorship and fandom. Still, many aspects of this digitally inflected reality are in a state of flux, with emergent forms of community and engagement existing alongside new modalities of control and commercialization. Consequently, one of the significant effects of convergent media is the dispersion of the sporting experience across multiple platforms, involving a concurrent increase in the complexity of power dynamics between leagues, media corporations, and audiences. Mediatization is, therefore, a process operating at many levels and at various speeds, which also takes sport in diverse and often contradictory directions. Employing the theoretical lenses of Baudrillard, Debord, and Turner, updated through contemporary scholarship on convergence culture, it is argued and demonstrated that the fusion of sport and convergent media demands a critical examination of platform governance, datafication, and the very future of community in an increasingly hyperreal world. This research offers a new perspective by establishing a conceptual framework for sociological inquiries into sport’s technological and economic interface. This analysis engages directly with recent scholarship to update and sharpen the critique of commercialized sport, concluding that the evolving sportscape necessitates a critical interrogation of its intricate power relations.