Have Matchroom given up on UK shows?

Social media changed the game.

It's spectacle over substance now. Selfie at a stadium or Saudi show looks a lot better than one at York Hall or some leisure centre.

Shame really, because the whole middle of the sport is vanishing, like you say. It's either NXTGEN prospects on small cards, or anything half decent dressed up as PPV.

 

Exactly. Doing shows in Times Square when there’s 2 arenas a mile down the road. It’s not a concert.

 

Froch Groves 2 definitely started it in 2014, then AJ carried it on from late 2015 onwards, without AJ it wouldn’t have been anything like it was, AJ fought twice a year so you always had ‘an AJ night’ to look forward to, then we had like 14 male world champions at one point which meant big name foreigners coming over here like Spence Brook etc, AJ bought in loads of fans which filtered so they could do other stadium shows like brook spence, Sky sport news was also massive back then as there was no streaming alternatives like DAZN, and even social media wasn’t quite as big so sky sports news was literally the place to be seen, and even IFL TV was new and big back then, i used to watch all their videos and i discovered IFL TV during AJ whyte which was a huge event, there was 1-2 massive events every year with massive names, and the names were massive partly because of sky sports news etc, all these factors and more seem to blend at the right time, but yeah Froch Groves 2 was lift off but AJ kept it going for 5-6 years.

 

All British grudge matches too like Frampton v Quigg, Joshua v Whyte, Haye v Bellew etc. Now there’s barely enough well known Brits to make one side of a fight never mind both.

The Joshua nights were massive then you had the likes of Usyk, Lomachenko, Klitschko, Spence etc coming over to fight our champions.

Even the standard ‘fight nights’ were the likes of Lewis Ritson packing out arenas. Fowler v Fitzgerald was on an undercard, same as Groves fighting for a world title. Them fights would be Matchroom’s only UK offering for 3 months now.

COVID and the lack of fans/spectacle started to kill it and then the move to DAZN finished it.

 

yeah exactly, so many fights i could reel off from those days, every level was better then:

Main events were actually massive names with great build up for an all british fight like you mentioned or it would be a great foreign fighter like GGG / Loma / Spence / Linares / Wlad etc fighting a brit for a belt

Chief support was also a big name.

Undercards were better as well and had good domestic fights, not a load of prospects against bums.

And non ppv headliners had world tittle fights quite often with guys who weren’t ’big names’ so they were non ppv, like the Mcdonnel brothers, Ryan Burnett, Crolla, Selby, Burns etc