Footballers' Image Right in the New Media Age - The Case Study of David Beckham

 

Image rights, broadly defined as the commercial appropriation of someone’s personality, including indices of their image, voice, name and signature, have become increasingly important in the political economy of media sport. 

A range of legal, economic and political arguments have developed in the world of football as to what image rights actually are, their legal efficacy and their potential impact on developments in the long-standing relationship between sport and the media. 

This article focuses on the problematic definition of the term in places like the UK and how it relates to certain economic and commercial transformations in British football. Using the English Premier League and the ‘‘celebrity footballer’’ David Beckham as its primary focus, this article traces the rise of image rights clauses in player contracts. 

This process is analysed in the context of rapid and dramatic change in the media coverage of the sport. The paper focuses on the growing legal complexities of protecting star images in relation to the Internet and the wider issues of football, fandom and popular culture.

Beckham, or at least, the commercialised Beckham, has profited from the same kinds of processes that create kings from fools, luminaries from dullards, girls from underachieving nymphets. All have been delivered to a vast audience courtesy of a media with a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for celebrities. 

In the age of Beckham and Rooney, Ronaldo and Zidane, the attempt to commercially control both images and information around football has never been so great. For those players at the pinnacle of the sport the rewards of playing the professional game and the commercial trappings that accompany it are viewed as recognition that their worth is not purely born of how they play the game but also by their market value as a brand. 

Footballers' Brand Evaluation

As any economist will tell you, brands are notoriously difficult things to evaluate and are prone to fluctuations in the potency of their symbolic and capital worth. Nevertheless, the elite of these world’s footballers, the superstars of the game, are now traded on this intangible value with the capture of their so-called ‘‘image rights’’ central to any contractual negotiations between player, agents, club and national federation.

This article intends to investigate the phenomenon of ‘‘image rights’’ from both a critical perspective on intellectual property and more broadly through a critique of the political economy of sport and the media; that inseparable couplet that presents a marker of contemporary culture and entertainment at the start of the twenty-first century.

 As a consequence, what is at stake is the decay of a certain aspect of football as popular culture that has matured through the origins of spectator sport and its mediated spectacle into something that millions of people enjoy and connect with on various levels.

In other words, it is increasingly the case that significant sectors of football culture are being commodified through the enclosure of intellectual property rights, that encroach on areas of fandom and cultural practice that were once unrestrained or at least freer in both "senses of the word" than is currently the case. It is not that I would argue that things used to be better in "the good old days", nor that sport stars should not enjoy the trappings of their successful careers. 

It is more that I fear that on economic grounds alone the football industry is in danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. As Morrow has documented, financial mismanagement by football clubs has seriously damaged the health of certain sectors of the professional sport in both England and Scotland largely due to exorbitant wage demands and an inability to keep a tight reign on the fiscal management of the game.

The steady march to the hyper-commodification of sport has been happening for a long time and we should therefore not be surprised by its scale, predominantly expressed through the economic dependency of football and television. 

Football needs television for the cash injection "the rights of access to broadcast" can bring. In negotiations over television rights contracts, broadcasters may well point to the public exposure they provide to the sport and the benefits such publicity affords.

 In the age of niche sports channels this argument loses some of its credibility. It is the economic rents football extracts from the relationship with television that underpins many of the strategic decisions made at the elite end of the professional game not the scale of its exposure. 

Television organizations need football for the ready-made audience and symbolic value it can bring to their channels in terms of ratings and subscriptions. These dual forces "the financial needs of football and the drawing power of football for broadcasters" represent the economic motivations behind the changes in elite professional football leagues around the world. 

Their consequences are deep seated and far reaching, and in my focus on one aspect of these processes, the rise of player image rights, I am suggesting that the balance between football as an industry and its consumers (the fans) is increasing tilted toward the economic imperatives and greed of the games’ elite clubs and players.

This Paper is Written By RICHARD HAYNES, University of Stirling, UK and Culled from Sports Academia