I've suspect for a while now that Wilder/Fury 2 is agreed for down the line. I may be wrong but I've got a hunch. Wilder didn't turn down that DAZN money just to fight bums.
Wilder isn't interested in the Joshua fight , his team have made every excuse up possible. 1.He won't take the fight as he wasn't allowed in the ring. 2.They sent offer to Joshua without any details or contract. 3.$100M Dazn offer 4.Lining up Ortiz and that other Bricklayer Fury can't knock Wilder out, Joshua can. They don't want the fight, Hearn & Joshua do.
I know you don't like talking about the business side but to me one of the most fascinating questions is how ESPN/Top Rank and Showtime/PBC respond to the challenge of DAZN. Do they work together? They are competitors but they both want to maintain the PPV model. So do they tell their fighters to turn down the DaZN offers to try to keep them from getting established?
If two of the three parties are to work together, you get the feeling it'll be ESPN/Top Rank and Showtime/PBC for the reasons you've mentioned. DAZN are a threat to PPV and subscriber's. They're the new players in the game and nobody wants new competition. The same goes for Hearn; Arum and Haymon don't want him to be successful in America and won't assist him unless they've nowhere else to go. The issue is that ESPN and Showtime will have to do a dual PPV broadcast and Fury/Wilder 2 isn't big enough for that at the moment. That's why they're both going on this three fight run, to try and build their profiles and the public desire for a rematch. Whether or not they'll be succesful I don't know. To make a dual broadcast worthwhile you need huge PPV numbers.
Problem is that without Joshua and without fighting each other they are literally left with the likes of Breazeale and Ortiz at best. Very, very hard to see how the fight becomes bigger than it was in the immediate aftermath of a contentious draw. Nobody is going to watch Fury play with Schwarz and Wilder demolish an even more ancient Ortiz and think 'I wasn't watching the rematch before but now I am.'
You've missed the point. For it to be a co-promotion it needs building to a stratospheric level, and that isn't happening watching Wilder ice people he's already beaten or Tyson flapping around and sticking his tongue out against German bouncers. The funny thing is that the fight won't get a bigger build up than it would have had if they just had the rematch straight away.
No, casual observers of the sport don’t care that Breazeale has already been dealt with by AJ. Wilder’s stock has gone up further by absolutely sparking Breazeale starfish style in a showreel knockout 20 minutes quicker than AJ did it. Through the medium of social media that knockout ended up on most people’s timelines. Therefore, the fight has just got bigger. Fury has absolutely no problem getting people talking about him, either.
More next time chat as ever. The first fight didn't do that well and Fury ducked a rematch to fight a guy nobody has heard of. Meanwhile Wilder's next fight did poor ticket sales and wasn't even on PPV. You seem to routinely mention things like highlight reels and viral videos - but they don't ever seem to translate into the sort of business that is needed to make the fight a co-promotion.
You're wrong here Tony. 100%. Every fight gets bigger the longer they don't take place, provided both parties keep winning. The winning is key. A loss can derail the whole thing which makes the delay a gamble. I'm not saying it will be big enough for a succesful dual broadcast. But provided both win all their fights up until the rematch, there's no question it grows. Especially with all the promotiom and media work they're doing.
Videos that go viral translate into business. I know that for a fact in my occupation. I have seen people like Paul Smith, an unknown albeit decent jobbing comedian sell out arenas off the back of 2 minute long viral clips. This is minuscule compared to what the likes of world class boxers can achieve in reaching out to a bigger audience with their own viral clips. I will say it one more time, a second Wilder v Fury fight would be huge. Wilder v Joshua would be huger.
You miss the point. I'm not saying it won't be bigger than the first fight. (It will.) I'm saying that they won't have an opportunity to create a bigger build up than they did in the aftermath of the first fight. If Fury fights three Schwarz types and bores everyone to tears, the drama of the Wilder fight becomes more of a distant memory as time passes.
Why do people keep citing the DAZN offer as evidence of Wilder's ducking? An AJ fight WAS NOT part of the deal, as it is not allowed to be.
