The Beltline: The revolution sometimes plays out in front of empty seats in silent rooms

Nobody ever said a boxing event had to be a noisy occasion. Nor has anyone ever said that a boxing event must take place in a crowded venue in order for it to be financially viable and put smiles on the faces of everybody sitting at ringside. 

Increasingly, in fact, it seems that ticket sales are becoming irrelevant as a revenue stream and that the sound of silence is now the soundtrack to which world-class fighters ply their trade. This is in large part due to the ever-growing influence of Saudi Arabia and Riyadh Season, the impact of which has changed boxing in every conceivable way. Now, for better or worse, boxers have different goals in mind, now promoters do entirely different jobs, and now the event itself takes on an altogether new look and sound. 

These days it is not uncommon to see a huge fight card packed full of compelling fights play out in an arena awash with empty seats. It is just as common to hear the chat of corner teams and commentary teams, so quiet is the atmosphere during rounds. 

On Saturday, for instance, a junior welterweight fight between Jose Ramirez and Arnold Barboza was so timid and low-key in its presentation one couldn’t help but wonder if the sound had been lost. During the referee’s instructions, for example, you were able to hear every sound made by every person in the arena, and then, once the camera pulled back, you realized exactly why: there were, despite this being the chief support contest, very few people in attendance in Riyadh. 

This hardly improved for the main event, either. That fight, a cruiserweight contest between Chris Billam-Smith and Gilberto Ramirez, deserved much better, both in terms of noise and appreciation, but chances are neither of the fighters involved would have expected anything different. This, you see, is the deal they have agreed to make. What Riyadh Seasons gives to fighters, it takes away from the fights themselves. 

For Billam-Smith, someone who won his WBO cruiserweight belt in a football stadium before thousands of fans last year, Saturday’s atmosphere must have been an unusual one to say the least. Where there were once people, there was now an abyss, and where he once heard noise, he now heard only his own breathing and racing pulse. 

In terms of the watching experience, it is much like sitting in an empty cinema watching a film you have anticipated for a long time. The experience itself remains the same, and will to some extent remain an enjoyable one, but never will certain jokes or scenes affect you on the same emotional level as they would if surrounded by other human beings from whom you borrow not only warmth but energy.  

With Riyadh Season, the main events are often so good it hardly matters who is watching, how many are watching, or what kind of noises they make in the process of watching. Yet the fights beneath those high-profile main events, especially on the big shows starting early, are the ones that seem to suffer from a lack of early interest. In the arena, nobody shows up, while at home, one sits down to watch with a sudden feeling of sadness, as if having entered an empty car park to watch a couple of homeless people scrap over a bottle of beer. It returns you not to boxing’s glory days but instead to 2020 and 2021, when a global pandemic stripped the sport back to its foundations and we realized both the fragility of its scaffolding and the importance of fans. 

Empty seats and dead atmospheres are not issues exclusive to Saudi Arabia, by the way. Involve yourself with a boxing promotion at any level, whether in America or here, in Britain, and you will know what it is like to sell a fight nobody wants to see and then turn up on the night with more empty seats than bodies and only the echoes of regret ringing around a soulless venue. What makes the experience so incongruous in Riyadh, though, is the very fact that the product itself is of great quality. These are not mismatches or small-hall fights being put on by overambitious promoters. These are instead fights involving some of the world’s best boxers, many of whom have experience of fighting in sold-out venues elsewhere.

That, more than anything, is what makes the sight of a fight like Billam-Smith vs. Ramirez playing out to nobody such an unusual and, in some ways, depressing one. It is easy to understand why the fighters suck it up, of course, and easy to see how the deal they have struck helps more than it hurts, but that doesn’t make it any less of a shame for everybody taking part. 

Do they ultimately care? Perhaps not. Thinking only short term, what does it matter how many people are in attendance on fight night, so long as the boxers involved are getting handsomely compensated? It does, in that respect, share certain similarities with what is going on currently in the book industry, where something like BookTok – a corner of TikTok geared towards sharing book recommendations – has helped to spike book sales in recent years while at the same time killing the attention spans, not to mention the ability to focus and think, of future readers. Again, with one hand it gives, yet with the other it takes away. 

Whenever on tour, Riyadh Season events have fared better. We saw a big crowd, for example, at Wembley Stadium when Daniel Dubois knocked out Anthony Joshua in September and Terence Crawford in Los Angeles didn’t appear to do too badly, either. Yet it is at home, where no boxing culture presently exists, that Riyadh Season may struggle to maintain long-term interest in boxing events, particularly the ones not featuring the biggest names. It is also important to consider how financially viable it is for the people behind Riyadh Season to regularly take their show on the road when it is so much easier and less stressful to keep everything on home turf. There, despite the presence of empty seats and a lack of buzz, overheads are comparatively low and the purpose of it all is not so convoluted. You know why they’re doing it, you know how they’re doing it, and you know fighters, promoters and content creators will still happily make the trip whenever receiving the signal – a dollar sign for some, a pound sign for others.