In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic is giving sports a timeout. Due to the risk of infection, in Germany no sports events with live spectators were allowed for weeks starting on March 13. The question arises, what would be the impact on spectators and with that on live broadcasting for different sports? While professional sport leagues like handball and hockey (ice hockey) stopped, the football (soccer) league restarted games without spectators on May 16. Using two approaches of sports action as a public presentation of performance and the consumption capital theory, the share of revenues like media, spectators, sponsoring of the biggest sport leagues in Germany is compared. Following this up, the economic impact of COVID-19 on professional sports in Germany is explained. As a result games without spectators (‘ghost games’), the gap between major sports and minor sports seems to be becoming larger.

For sports actors, social media provide the opportunity to bypass sports journalism's gatekeeping function and to disseminate sports-related information to target groups directly. Thus, social media have been conceptualized as a competitor to journalism. We argue that the relation is much more diverse. We differentiate between competitive, integrative, and complementary facets of the relationship between sports journalism and social media. Our study focuses on complementarity and analyzes how far social and mainstream media serve as sources for each other. Therefore, we combine an online survey among 122 German sports journalists, an analysis of the Twitter networks of German sports journalists during the Winter Olympics 2014, and a content analysis of the most popular news items in social media. Results suggest that sports journalists perceive social media accounts of athletes as beneficial news sources, especially to gather inside information. Huge sports events influence the social media activities of sports journalists as they tend to have stronger connections to athletes at these times. Whereas social media appear to be significant sources for sports journalism, sports media content receives little attention in social media. However, our results indicate that sports journalism and social media indeed maintain a complementary relation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on all societal domains, including sports. Social distancing measures and the closure of sports facilities posed especially severe challenges for grassroots sports clubs, which thrive on joint activities and member social contact. Drawing on mediatization theory, the study examines the communication challenges faced by grassroots sports clubs and the perceived potential of digital media to overcome these obstacles during and beyond the pandemic. Based on in-depth interviews with 32 club officials of German grassroots sports clubs, the study identified ongoing uncertainty about COVID-19 regulations, preserving members’ sense of belonging during social distancing, and involving everyone in formal processes as the major communication challenges. While most of the interviewees valued the potential of digital media to address these challenges, they acknowledged that the benefits of digital media for individual members would depend on their skill, motivation, and concerns, as well as on the availability of digital infrastructure. For that reason, digital media were not considered a substitute for face-to-face social contact or sporting activity but were seen to extend opportunities for communication and training. More generally, these findings raise new questions about the relationship between mediatization and social cohesion.

Newspaper sports departments in Germany are reacting to changes in social media by expanding their offerings and employing a variety of publishing and engagement strategies. In this constantly evolving media environment, it is important to understand how newsrooms utilize social media to inform their audiences. This study examines the approaches German newspapers apply to publishing sports content on social media, and outlines how users interact with these posts. In analyzing these aspects, this paper applies theoretical elements of agenda setting and audience engagement, gender in media, and quality and diversity of published content. Social media posts were examined across eight German publications, totaling 3633 posts from Twitter and Facebook. Results in the study, which is part of the global 2021 Social Media International Sports Press Survey, highlighted how most of the content published by German newspapers on social media aimed to redirect users to the publications’ websites. The findings also reflect how social media is used less as an editorial space and more as part of a campaign to increase the audience. These results demonstrate challenges for the quality of sports coverage distributed via social networks in Germany.

Data visualisation is an area developing strongly in sports journalism. Via the example of football in Germany, this article presents a survey of current potentials of data journalism in sport. We have analysed the challenges of assessing and publishing data in professional online sports journalism. By means of five interviews with experts and an analysis of the content of three special-interest blogs, trends in the use of data in sports reporting, as well as the potentials and dangers, were shown. Here, we can identify, above all, the complexity of football, the incorporation of data without any context, the danger of tailoring data to a topic, as well as mistakes in entering data as problems. For sports journalists, relevant are a lack of (technical) knowledge, the increasing time pressure and growing expectations of recipients. Our analysis reveals that data must not be seen as the equivalent of objectivity. It does not seem possible to capture an entire sporting competition with data-driven journalism. It has become clear that the demands on sports journalists will grow in future, if they want to add value for recipients by applying data.