BoxRec

Just watching Hearn's latest IFL "Raw" interview about 36 minutes in he goes into an excellent breakdown of fight revenue and this growing trend of unreasonable demands from fighters, sorry I still dont know how to post links, highly recommend though

Yeah. I said similar on here a few days ago.

Boxers, primarily in the US, have been overpaid for several years in relation to what they bring in. Started with PBC and continued with Matchroom’s entry to the market and others have followed.

Teofimo’s fight against Josh Taylor brought in an average audience of 780k viewers. On a 3 hour show that’s probably $1-1.5m in TV ad revenue for ESPN. Ad rates are particularly low at the moment as companies have more choice in how they advertise and many are limiting their spends. 3,000 tickets is probably $500k in ticket sales so I’d say the most the event brought it in was $2.5m (including overseas TV) and that’s before the cost of venue hire and undercard fighters.

The combined purses of Teo and Taylor would have been well above that so someone would have taken a loss. That would likely be ESPN who will only care about viewing figures and ad revenues.

ESPN’s Top Rank viewing figures average around 700k this year. They’re quite often matched by UFC’s prelims shows where the combined purses of the fighters will probably be $300k.

Fighters like Teo are delusional. He’s not the only one but boxing over the next couple of years really needs to address the economic realities of where the sport is or more and more TV networks will move away from the sport.

Good break down

Every couple of years.. Hearn talks about this..

He’s part of the problem. He was one of the first to go to Saudi money first.

He talks about rights fees. Overpaid boxers.

It was him who gave Garcia-Vargas a combined purse of $10m

Ruthless-RKO wrote: ↑11 Nov 2023, 05:58 Every couple of years.. Hearn talks about this..

He’s part of the problem. He was one of the first to go to Saudi money first.

He talks about rights fees. Overpaid boxers.

It was him who gave Garcia-Vargas a combined purse of $10m

Taking overseas money isn’t a bad thing if it’s on offer. It means the networks shouldn’t be taking a loss which is what’s happening at the moment and the financiers, whether it’s Monaco, Saudi, Abu Dhabi are happy to pay for it.

It doesn’t help bring fighter pay down though and has been one of the main causes of top level heavyweight inactivity.

Agree re: Garcia/Vargas. Both massively overpaid. DAZN were trying to crack the market and even before that, due to PBC, fighter pay was too high and then DAZN/Eddie took it up further. Since then we’ve lost Showtime/Fox are US boxing networks and haven’t had any significant new ones. If boxing was delivering strong returns then that wouldn’t be the case.

DAZN will take on US boxing.

My view is that fighters should get a smaller guaranteed pay and larger % of revenue (or maybe profit after venue hire). This should be everyone on the card too with varying percentages. Maybe even split it by viewers at any one time during the fight. Promote the fight as you please and the boxers get paid their worth while the promoters can balance their books more to be more sustainable without extorting fans.

Ruthless-RKO wrote: ↑11 Nov 2023, 05:58 Every couple of years.. Hearn talks about this..

He’s part of the problem. He was one of the first to go to Saudi money first.

He talks about rights fees. Overpaid boxers.

It was him who gave Garcia-Vargas a combined purse of $10m

Getting extravagant fees is all good and well but fighters have to accept that if it's not on offer then they best lower their expectations

As for vastly overpaying the likes of Garcia and Vargas, it was seen to be necessary to try gatecrash the US market, same as Shalom is doing in UK at the moment, you've got to speculate to accumulate n all that, Hearn always says it wouldn't last, probably the reason why PBC is a mess, most of these guys have no profile because they don't have a mouthpiece yet they demand OTT purses, that's why they never fight and when they do its bang average and ppv for the privilege