of tertiary mediality, such as radio and television broadcasts of sporting events or quiz shows are based on a medial representation and adaptation of games of primary and secondary mediality, i.e., they allow for tele-audiovisual participation—mostly passive and remote—in edited simulations of reality as well as edited symbolic representations of reality.
The role of players and that of the audience differ radically across medialities: games of primary and secondary mediality allow players, as well as physically present observers, to engage in interactions that are partly self-determined and partly determined by others, whereas the proportional relation between audience and players remained relatively equal through the early 20th century. Games of tertiary mediality, on the other hand, do not only lead to an audience of millions watching a few players, they also subjugate the tiny minority of players to diverse medial regimes—from the selection of which sporting event to broadcast all the way to the live direction of several cameras and their perspectives through which every “real” game play is audiovisually fragmented and distorted.
CASE STUDY:
SOCCER—A GAME’S JOURNEY THROUGH MEDIALITIES
The historical process, in which individual forms of play accumulate numerous medial forms, can be demonstrated with the example of SOCCER, the “most universal cultural phenomenon in the world”15 and at the same time a central “sector of the global entertainment industry.”16 Estimates from the international soccer association FIFA say that at the start of the 21st century there were a billion active soccer players and 50 million referees, while the total length of white lines painted on soccer fields across the world could cover 25 million kilometers, “enough to circle the earth over a thousand times.”17 The beginnings of the game were less spectacular.
Pre-technical and largely unregulated variants can still be observed today when players kick around rocks or round fruit, such as apples, oranges, and melons. The game advanced from primary to secondary mediality around 4,000 years ago with the handcrafting of the first—still solid—balls from various materials, including leather and rubber, and the development of basic rules.18 However, the various ball games from Asia to Middle America emerged within the socio-cultural context of religious rites and warlike conflicts:
“Sometimes a substitute for war, the game could also provide its denouement as defeated opponents first played the game before being sacrificed—their heads cut off or their hearts torn out.”19
The preference to play ball games not with one’s hands but rather with one’s feet originated in prehistoric times as well as antiquity and continued through modern European times via Celtic cultures, as they maintained some independence from the Christian, game-hostile Middle Ages:
“All appear to have played large-scale and often riotous ball games in large open spaces with innumerable participants divided into two teams trying to get the ball to a particular place with few formalities or restrictions.20 […] Often the games were played between two parishes or villages, the ball carried across the open fields between them.21 […] It was certainly violent enough for deaths and injuries to be recorded.”22
The historical process through which SOCCER found its modern form began in the British public schools of the 18th and early 19th centuries, especially at Rugby and Eton. Athletic activities in general and SOCCER in particular played a prominent role in both Rugby and Eton’s curriculum as well as in the establishment of their self-image. In order to enable tournaments, a successive codification and standardization of rules had to be set in place, first within schools and then between different schools. In a second step SOCCER burst from the upper-class and upper-middle-class world of these schools into broader population groups: “Almost from the moment of its codification football was colonized by the British working classes as both players and spectators.”23
In Great Britain, the homeland of industrialization, the popularization of SOCCER followed the examples set by sports like horse racing, rowing, boxing, or cricket, which were already entrenched in the aristocratic and merchant classes: first agreement by different clubs on common rules and procedures, then formation of leagues, and then establishment of regional and national championships. The important standardization of the ball—its size, material, and quality—occurred in 1872.24 The role of the field referee was introduced in 1881, though he only attained his current function in 1898.25 In 1882 the goal gained a crossbar, in 1892 a net.26 Since the mid-1880s amateurs were slowly replaced with paid professionals despite standing bans on the practice. At the start of the First World War around 5,000 professionals earned their living with SOCCER.27
In the context of this professionalization of the most popular sport of industrial culture, the medialization of SOCCER took place as well. A first step consisted of—as it did already in the modern medialization of the theater—the construction of specialized buildings that allowed ever-larger numbers of people to follow the game from a variety of perspectives which were at least tolerable. Within a few decades these novel soccer stadiums in Great Britain reached and exceeded the capacity of the previously largest entertainment structure in human history: the Roman Coliseum with its 50,000-80,000 seats. The 1907 completed stadium in Glasgow, for example, then the largest in the world, could house over 120,000 spectators.28
Concurrently, various attempts were carried out to make soccer games, or at least their final scores, available to those who could not be there in person. Since the 1880s important results were transmitted via telegraph to faraway cities in order to announce them in post offices, restaurants, and bars.29 SOCCER newspapers and magazines sprung up and reached ever-higher circulation numbers. For example, the weekly newspaper Scottish Referee, founded in 1888, circulated 500,000 copies in the first decade of the 20th century, at a time when Scotland had around five million residents.30 In 1907, the British Daily Mail published the first photos of soccer games.31
The crucial next step of this medialization resided in the live broadcasting of games. On the radio this took place for the first time in January of 1927, three weeks after the founding of the BBC.32 And so SOCCER arrived in tertiary mediality. The first transmission via television, again through the BBC in an experimental broadcasting operation, happened only a decade later in September 1937.33 In the founding years of television, the 1950s and 1960s, SOCCER and television entered into a symbiotic relationship—at least in Great Britain and continental Europe: Next to the transmission of game and entertainment shows as well as the broadcasting of motion pictures, SOCCER decisively contributed to television’s status as the new defining medium of the era. Vice versa the integration of sports into tertiary mass media through live-broadcasts, announcements in news programs, and special
