I agree 100%. Okolie must fulfill the contract he has signed with Matchroom and then he can change stable. In this case, however, he has been unprofessional and behaved stupidly.
True. The fight against Chamberlain was absolutely awful. A real snooze fest. Sad as it had a good build-up and decent potential.
And suddenly Hearn will change tune from "we built Okolie by losing money on all his fights" to asking a fortune to buy out the last one. "This is the one that would have paid us back" etc
Can’t blame people for leaving DAZN. The issue i think they will have though is that if they have X amount of fights left is actually getting them out, with DAZN concentrating on **** cards with the same old boxers on the younger ones will struggle.
Thing is though, Hearn makes out he's this builder of stars - but in the past 10 years all he's really done is take a few middle-of-the-road or underachieving names, hyped them beyond belief and got Sky to get casuals watching them. The era of Barker, Crolla, Bellew, etc was made credible by having Froch in beside them and then the rise of Joshua - but on their own they were worthless. Whyte only made his name off Joshua too. Aside from those, how many young fighters has this Matchroom era created? Please nobody mention Conor Benn. Okolie must see that - he's not really gaining anything by hanging around with Matchroom because they know he isn't one for the casuals and definitely not someone people subscribe to watch.
The only one I can think Hearn built really was AJ, and I would give Sky equal credit for that too. Outside of that, he hasn’t built anyone - Crolla, Bellew and Froch were all built by other promoters before jumping ship.
You could be unfair and say other promoters let them go or didn't agree with their value (in which case Hearn might have been a good move).
Eddie sold false promises with DAZN. Okolie must have thought he was going to be swimming in benjamins from the billion dollar budget
Episode you blame him? He has paid him circa 1.5/2m in purses and now has him to a worthwhile position where he sees that investment back only for the guy to jump ship. Would you be happy with it?
Hearn has lost a lot of boxers recently and his undercards are getting weaker all the time. Now Okololie and Chisora are unhappy. If AJ loses badly to Usyk and retires and Canelo stops working with Matchroom, what will Eddie have left in his stable and how long till DAZN and papa Barry lose their faith in him? It makes you wonder how much of Eddie Hearn's success was down to him and much was down to Sky and Adam Smith as well as his father playing a much bigger role in the early days when he started out. He has made a lot of very bad decisions in recent years, including: letting Brook fight GGG; leaving Sky and joining the poor man's Boxnation; spreading himself far too thin; losing the strong alliances he had with US promoters by encroaching into their territory; and, letting his top fighters fight underrated and dangerous opponents when not necessary e.g. Whyte v Povetkin and Warrington v Lara.
Carl Froch was not built at all. Before he went to matchroom I can't even remember what channel his fights were on.