The saturation of Western media sport markets has prompted a turn to the predominantly youthful, increasingly urbanized cultural milieu associated with forms of "aspirational" middle-class consumption of globalized Western sport. Asia has become a prime target for the expansionary strategies of some of the world's most powerful professional sports leagues, teams, and media conglomerates. Although other media and cultural industry sectors in Asia, such as film and television drama, enjoy increasing content localization and intraregional exchange, media sport remains decidedly Western dominated. The influence of transnational broadcasters in Asia and the intensive marketing efforts of Western sports interests are combining to privilege European-and American-based sports leagues, such as the English Premier League and the National Basketball Association, which tend to "crowd out" domestic Asian professional sport. Sport fan engagement within the "media sports cultural complex" in Asia tends to produce a form of consumption predisposed to advantage globally marketed Western sports competitions and their celebrities (some of whom are "migrant" Asian sport stars) and so hampers the development of "indigenous" Asian sport and media. This article critically analyzes sport and consumption in Asia with reference to a range of sports, especially, soccer and basketball, and various Asian nations, particularly, China.

As sport has circulated around the globe, its practice and expression have both replicated its established (and substantially Western-dominated) power formation, and to varying degrees challenged and modified it. The growing popularity of these sportsentertainment cultures reflects emergent media and leisure economies combining global aspirational cosmopolitanism with local cultural identities and histories. These multiple modes of cultural adaptation are evident in various Asian contexts in relation to the English Premier League (EPL) (and association football (soccer) in general), and hybridized local forms of global sport such as the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket and the J-League (Japanese professional soccer). This article examines, in reference to these cases, the ways in which global sport culture is constrained by its historical inheritance yet also making new, multi-faceted cultural histories. It argues that the trajectory of sport's global cultural development is not subject to a simple logic of adoption and imitation, but is created out of multiple, intersecting correspondencesand non-correspondences -between histories, sites and social formations. The cultural complexion of sport -not least in the vibrantly performative sphere of fandom -is undergoing profound, culturally adaptive change, and analytical frameworks foregrounding sporting cultural importation and pale imitation require a concomitant re-consideration and adaptation.

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Contemporary media sports culture is dominated by the West, and media sport studies has tended to focus on Western contexts. The Asia Pacific region is now a more significant feature of the global media sports cultural complex, however, through the increasingly lucrative export of Western sport television rights and merchandising, the staging of megamedia sports events in the region, the conspicuous role of sport stars from the Asia Pacific in Western sport competitions, and, in some cases, even a shift in the balance of institutional and economic power from West to East. Drawing mainly on the cases of association football (soccer), cricket, and basketball, this article identifies the complex and multidirectional flows of labor, capital, images, identities, and audiences into, from, and within the Asian media sports environment. It considers whether such developments might constitute de-, re-, or even post-Westernization and proposes the necessity of closer attention to these issues in critical media sport studies.