To be fair this has happened for years. Consider this entire PPV card from a decade ago: Khan Salita. (A complete mismatch.) Mitchell Prescott. (Fair enough - good fight.) Simpson Bell. (Relatively competitive lower undercard stuff.) Arthur Wright. (Eight rounder.) Saunders, DeGale, Gavin, Maccarinelli, Smith, Bellew and Heffron against opposition with a combined 53-103-10 record. Only Gavin fought an opponent with a winning record and he was 10-5. That was it. I imagine £10 on the seven fights at the bottom would have seen you win about ten pence. Couple that with a fairly farcical main event and what are you paying for?
Of course it is, but my point is that a quality main event sells. The undercard could literally be nothing and Joshua Wilder sells at record levels. That's why for certain fights you just aren't going to get a quality undercard.
But for a fight like Eubank/DeGale for example to be on PPV, you'd have thought they'd need to prop it up with at least a couple of good fights
I've said all along that fights are PPV or not based on no more than how they sell. If the Degale Eubank undercard is rubbish and it still does half a million sales it's a PPV fight. If they stack the undercard with loads of quality and it does fifty thousand it's a failure.
but you can't know that until after the fact. And that shouldn't be how it works anyway. From a business point of view, trying to earn as much money, i get it, but imo, PPV should only be for the top fights, or domestic fights where there is a ridiculous amount of hype, e.g Froch/Groves II. Everything half decent is going on PPV, and there's no world title fights on regular Sky anymore. Its a joke
The end doesn't justify the means, which is where you seem to be at odds with most people on here. Just because a fight CAN sell a few hundred thousand PPV buys, it doesn't mean it should be put on PPV. Most 'casual' fans buying PPVs will believe they are paying to watch boxing at its highest level. People are mis-sold stuff all the time because they simply don't know better, and that's what we are starting to see a lot more of with boxing. You can't come somewhere like here where people know the true value of stuff like DeGale vs Eubank, and not expect it to be slated. That's how these things are kept in check. If nobody ever scrutinised PPI and just kept listening to what the banks said about it, then I'm sure it would still be going now. If nobody scrutinises what the promoters do and pull them up on it, then it's only going to get worse and worse. Hearn said he was very reluctant to put on Haye vs Bellew. I'm paraphrasing, but he was worried it was a con too far i.e. such a poor fight in terms of quality, that it could easily backfire. Yeah he got away with it because Haye was so broken it made it exciting, but it doesn't mean boxing fans won't challenge this sort of thing. And if you're expecting people to just accept it, you're in for some pretty exhausting arguments.
Pointless trying a rational approach with him. Literally all his posts are about Hearn, matchroom, slagging Warren and justifying PPVs.
Good post. I'd slightly disagree that casual fans believe they are paying to watch boxing at its highest level. I think they're paying to watch fighters they know and enjoy watching by and large, or fights whereby there is a lot of intrigue or interest, but they're patently not paying top whack PPV prices purely for elite level boxing. The likes of Lomachenko and Crawford are barely known here for example. I'm also not too sure on what you mean by fans being mis-sold?
Again, all you seem to be saying is you want it to be cheaper so it should be cheaper. Why? I can't get a season ticket for a decent football team for anything less than just short of a grand, it costs me a hundred quid for a day of Ashes cricket and that's before I've bought a six quid pint, I need to hit the jackpot just to recover the cost of my ticket to go to Cheltenham, and I'm remortgaging the house before thinking about tickets to the Grand Prix. Now, you can of course say that football has cheaper options, and I can watch county cricket for next to nothing or go to Wolverhampton races on a Tuesday night, and I can. But by the same token, as a boxing fan I can watch Hughie Fury on Channel 5, or Kell Brook and Amir Khan on standard Sky. But if I want to watch something genuinely popular, then it's going to cost more.
No, that's not even remotely close to what i was talking about. I either want it to be a genuine PPV worthy headliner, an ACTUALLY stacked card or put on regular Sky.
But you miss the point that 'genuine PPV' is dictated by how many sales it makes and no more. Lomachenko v Garcia on the same card as Spence v Crawford is fantastic but it can't be PPV because it just won't sell, in this country at least. I've no doubt both me and you looked at Mayweather McGregor as something of a joke, but not in a million years was that not going on PPV. Not because it was a great fight, or that it had a great undercard, but purely because it was going to be popular. I get the frustration, but it's a bit like arguing that Evgeny Kissin should be selling more records than Justin Bieber. Quality doesn't always mean popularity.
We could keep going, but i don't thik we are going to agree on this. To me, you still can't know that until after the fact. I don't see how PPV can be dictated by what happens after the PPV has happened. I understand i'm not fully looking at it from a company point of view, but it's still wrong to me. @carlingeight more in-depth post is spot on for me.
I think we agree here. You can't tell how something is going to go until after the event. But my point is that that's the point when you can tell if something was PPV worthy or not.
