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Why is it that Ricky Hatton is more popular, and has a bigger following and is liked more than past British fighters such as Hamed, Benn, Eubank, Calzaghe, and Lewis, who were all much better fighters. Most of these guys were humble, and I find it very awkward that Calzaghe has about 200 fans traveling to Las Vegas to watch him fight Hopkins, and win (albeit controversial), whereas hatton has 24K fans watching him get blitzed in under 6 minutes.
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Benn, Eubank and Bruno were very popular. One of Frank Bruno's fights got 18 million viewers, and Benn and Eubank got pretty impressive viewing figures as well.
In the mid/late 90s, the TV company that showed these fights started to move away from boxing. Part of the reason was because of the Benn-McClellan fight. Also, Frank Warren signed an exclusive contract with Sky, who offered more money but had far less viewers.
So basically Calzaghe spent a lot of time fighting on a channel where hardly anyone could see him. He also had no popular domestic rivals to fight, whereas Benn and Eubank had each other+Watson.
Hatton/his team worked very hard at building up a fanbase for him in Manchester from very early on in his career. Calzaghe didn't really do that. A lot of Hatton's fans are from a football background, and so they are used to travelling 100s of miles to see their team underperform, so they are less likely to abandon him, even when he loses.
The Calzaghe-Lacy fight was shown on national TV, and from that point on his fanbase increased by a lot.
Lewis was never as popular as Bruno, probably because of fighting abroad so much, and also because of the Canadian/Olympics thing.
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