It really has been a huge fall from grace and it’s been that way ever since they made the greedy, yet naive move away from Sky Sports. You can guarantee they didn’t ask the opinions of their stable of boxers before they did it. I wonder if he remembers them, the people we follow in the game and who boxing is actually about, not him and his huge ego. Plus that to somehow letting Warren claw his way back in the position he was in near to his heyday yonks ago, when they essentially had the market tied up in the UK a few years back. They will leave the sport probably soon after when AJs career comes to an end. Shame, but I think it’s true.
I can’t believe a business as successful as Matchroom thought it was a good idea to leave Sky. Boxing is a very niche sport. Nobody subscribes to Sky just for boxing. At Xmas I watch darts on Sky but I’d never subscribe to a streaming service where the only thing shown was darts. This is how I expect most general sports fans feel regarding boxing. Keeping darts as the example, one of my mates will talk about it or it’ll be advertised during football and I think oh I’ll stick that on and just change the channel. Simplicity is key. People don’t want to be signing up to streaming services, paying a year in advance or signing up to 12 months of direct debit payments just to watch a boxing fight when they’re not really that arsed about it in the first place.
Good example with the darts. Matchroom also would have seen a few years earlier that Boxnation had struggled to gain subscribers even with a big fight that the public knew about with Haye v Chisora. Surely they took that into consideration before jumping from Sky? Maybe they didn’t. More likely the arrogance took over and they didn’t use that as an example of how it would most likely be and thought they could influence the public solely with Hearn and his gob and Twitter followers. Harsh reality is that it hasn’t happened and far from it. Have they ever had more subs than BN? I don’t know, but I doubt it. That business hemorrhages money year on year. In hindsight it could be said that Boxnation was better than DAZN for boxing fans because they had pretty much all the international content at one point. What is on the DAZN schedule now? Nothing exciting, I’m not even that arsed by Wood v Warrington, which on paper should be great. They badly need this Joshua v Wilder fight, but they needed it 5 years ago, it’s gone stale now with both of them suffering conclusive defeats against the real best in the division. It’s too late. On this fight, it serves them right with that $12.5 million flat fee offer they made to Wilder instead of a respectable split which it should have been when it was the right time to make the fight, when we, the boxing fans were excited by it and would have bought PPV. AJ probably could have won back then. Not now.
Very accurate and we can all relate to this. The other huge problem for sports broadcasting in 2023 is that the criminals are now increasingly making huge gains in the UK with the demand growing like a beanstalk due to rise in the plethora of subscriptions and Box Office events. This is getting worse by the week as word spreads rapidly and basically the policy of screwing every penny out of people's pockets is now resulting in zero pennies going to Sports Broadcasters and an average of £70 per year per person going to criminals. The only way this can be reversed now is less subscriptions and lower prices. DAZN UK stands no chance of making money in the current UK market.
Hearn thought he was bigger than Sky and that the British boxing ‘boom’ was down to him and not Sky, Joshua, the Olympics etc. His ego is out of control - putting himself on fight promotion videos and doing articles saying he’s the most famous person in British boxing. Absolute whopper these days in his mid life crisis with his terrible clobber.
To answer the question in the original post. Absolutely nothing. Just like the last 6/7 years that this fight first got dreamt up.
The No. 1 headline in UK boxing the last many years has been: Eddie Hearn says that AJ says (fill in the blank) Joshua has been kept at more than arm’s length from the press to preserve his image basically from the start, and especially after he hit the world stage. I always felt like when Hearn would tell us what AJ (allegedly) told him, it was just Hearn putting out there whatever he wanted or thought would ‘sell’ to the press — without ever running any of it past AJ.
Hearn said '2 to 3 weeks and we move on with something else', so many weeks ago I've lost count and there is still no contract, no date, no venue and seemingly no hope.
Breazeale Molina Takam Martin Whyteleafe Pulev Povetkin shot old VLADD Wilder and Fury don’t want any of that koogs. Trust me!
