Matchroom Boxing and Golden Boy Promotions are already regularly featured on DAZN. Queensberry Promotions will join forces with the streaming service in April. And with Top Rank’s deal with ESPN set to expire in summer 2025, that company is looking at the possibility of a new home, or multiple homes.
That doesn’t mean Top Rank will wind up on DAZN. But the promotions’ fight cards potentially landing on DAZN doesn’t bother Eddie Hearn, who heads up Matchroom.
“The more the merrier,” Hearn said in an interview with The Ariel Helwani Show.
It’s an interesting outlook. Hearn has been particularly outspoken when it comes to his competitors, drawing the ire of various executives. The politics of the boxing business have meant that promoters often won’t work with each other because they have exclusive output deals with their respective networks or streaming services.
On the other hand, adding another promoter to the same streaming service could mean a smaller share of the budget and therefore fewer dates available for a company. That’s not the way Hearn sees it, though. He thinks it will make DAZN stronger, and that a rising tide will lift all ships.
“The better the product, the better the offering to subscribers, the more subscribers DAZN are going to get,” Hearn said. “The more subscribers DAZN gets, the more profitable the business is. The more profitable the business is, the more opportunities there are for bigger shows, bigger budgets, more shows and more subscribers, more exposure to our fighters. I don’t want the platform all to myself. We want to bring great fights together.”
Matchroom and Queensberry have been working together more regularly of late thanks to the funding from Turki Alalshikh of Riyadh Season. The deal with DAZN will only encourage that to happen more frequently, Hearn said.
“You’re going to see more and more matchups with Queensberry fighters because there’s no network politics now,” he said. “We’re all on the same platform.”
There’s no guarantee that Top Rank will wind up with DAZN, but the company’s executives are pondering being with multiple broadcasters at the same time.
“We are out there talking to everybody,” Todd DuBoef, Top Rank’s president, said last week on The Ariel Helwani Show. “We actually love our partnership with ESPN. It’s so interesting because we’ve seen the deck change so much with the other sports. It’s been wonderful to watch. If it’s the NBA going to three media partners, the NFL’s at five. And then also looking at the perspective between legacy media and technology companies. Even compounding that, are you only looking at domestic rights or are you looking at global rights? I think all of these things are on the table. We’re really excited about what this next chapter looks like.”
And DuBoef said that ESPN isn’t necessarily going to stop showing boxing as a whole.
“We’re actually having conversations with ESPN as well,” he said. “We’ve had a great relationship with them. What it looks like after we go out into the marketplace and start talking to them and talking to the other players, we’ll see if there’s a place for them in our content stack. Obviously the guys there have been longtime relationships … so I really value them.”
David Greisman, who has covered boxing since 2004, is on Twitter @FightingWords2 and @UnitedBoxingPod. He is the co-host of the United Boxing Podcast. David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” is available on Amazon.
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