Eddie Hearn DAZN Move: Game Changed or Game Over for Matchroom Boxing? (PART 1 OF 2)

In 2012, Eddie Hearn's Matchroom Boxing signed an exclusive television deal with British broadcaster Sky Sports. This alliance remained strong for nine years and saw domestic talent like Carl Froch, Kell Brook and Tony Bellew, as well as heavyweight stars Derek Chisora, Dillian Whyte and Anthony Joshua, all headlining special Sky Box Office events and brining what had been a declining sport back into the mainstream. But after almost a decade together, the metaphorical devoice papers were served last month (2 June, 2021) when, after months of speculation, Hearn announced that he was not extending his deal with Sky Sports and was instead signing a new five year exclusive deal with the global sports streaming service, DAZN. In a sit down interview with IFL TV Hearn explained his reasons for ending his long standing partnership with Sky Sports. According to the promoter, three major factors in his decision to make the move were financial: a bigger budget to pay bigger stars to fight on bigger cards; the global platform that DAZN operates on compared to a domestic platform like Sky Sports; and finally complete control of production:  

“Once we shared this vision and the investment was there and it enabled me to grow the sport like I wanted to; make the fights I wanted to make; build the shows like I wanted to build them, you know, control the production and, of course, be part of such a global plan and global push. This was the deal for us.”(IFL TV) 

Eddie Hearn's critics were quick to point out that the promoter owed much of his success to the popularity of unified WBA-IBF-WBO heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, who has his own deal with Sky Sports that still has one fight left on it and may still decide to continue fighting on the Sky Sports Box Office platform. Another criticism was that Hearn's non-Joshua shows will now no longer benefit from cross promotion across the huge Sky platform, including Sky Sports News. So, is this “game-changed”, as the Matchroom marketing team keep tweeting out with every new announcement about the new DAZN deal, or, is it game-over for Matchroom Boxing and Eddie Hearn? 

 As Hearn pointed out in his interview with IFL TV, there are tremendous advantages to working with DAZN over Sky Sports. DAZN is owned by Len Blavatnik, who with his £23bn is Britain's richest person. This DAZN money has already lured pay-per-view superstar and pound-for-pound king, Canelo Alvarez, away from traditional Boxing platforms in the United States onto DAZN. So, the money does exist to get the sport's biggest stars to fight on the new platform. And the global audience of DAZN sets it apart from domestic broadcasters like Sky Sports and BT Sport in the UK, and ESPN and Fox Sports in the US. However, being global also puts the newbie in potential competition with Amazon Prime and Disney+ if these giants ever decided to put boxing on their platform. Recently, it was reported that Disney (whoown ESPN) were in talks to buy BT Sport, which could signal that they intend to have sports as part of their Disney+ streaming service in the UK. 

Hearn's insistence on having complete control of the production and his own previous comparisons with what he wants to do in boxing to what Dana White has already done in the UFC, has led fight fans to speculate that Matchroom Boxing might be seeking to become to boxing what the UFC is in Mixed-Martial-Arts (MMA), a near monopoly run by one man. Such a transformation in boxing would be welcomed by many fans as it would make super fights like Fury-Joshua easier to make, but Hearn will face massive obstacles in the boxing business that Dana White never had to contend with in MMA.

Currently in boxing there are four recognised governing bodies (WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO) each with their own world champions. In addition, there are multiple promotional companies and broadcasters in the sport. All of these factions are in direct competition with each other and only working together when it benefits all parties. Put simply boxing is organised chaos, which is why the big fights are so difficult to make when the different champions have different promoters and broadcast deals. In contrast the UFC is a juggernaut compared to even its biggest rival MMA promotion and it also sanctions its own world titles. Put simply fighters in the UFC have fewer options than their counterparts in boxing, which is why the super-fights fans want to see are easier to make, but also why UFC fighters make less money than boxers. For this reason a boxing promotional company using the UFC as a template is doomed to failure, it is simply not in the interest of the biggest stars in the sport, the rival promoters and rival broadcasters to allow it without overwhelming resistance. That at least seems to be the emerging consensus in the sport, however, in 1979, the son of a successful Professional Wrestling promoter bought his father's company and faced exactly the same challenges in transforming his company and business, proving it is possible, as we will consider in part two.