Those Absent From the Stadium are Always Right

This essay investigates the speeding up of sport and sports media in contemporary accelerated culture within the sociology of modernity. It reviews some ideas of Paul Virilio, including “theory at the speed of light,” which illuminates the impact of new information and communication technologies. Although Virilio is absent from sociological studies of sport and media, this essay begins to rectify this, looking anew at modernity, media, and sport in Virilio's “city of the instant.” Spectators attending an English Premier League match watch from an inert, sedentary position an accelerated spectacle flash by. This event is beamed around the globe “live” to “other” watching millions. Moreover, the mode in which the spectator watching at the stadium sees the spectacle is conditioned by decades of absorbing matches on television, sofa surfing, a state of “polar inertia” or “pathological fixedness”; or, to quote Virilio, “those absent from the stadium are always right.”