By Keith Idec
Frank Warren understands as well as anyone that if a promoter thinks boxing fans should pay extra to watch a fight, he can assume the financial risk and make it a pay-per-view event.
The veteran British promoter still thinks there has been a saturation of pay-per-view events in his market. Warren doesn’t consider Anthony Joshua-Kubrat Pulev a fight worthy of the pay-per-view platform.
Sky Sports Box Office, the British television rival of Warren’s Box Nation, will broadcast Joshua-Pulev as the main event of a pay-per-view show October 28 from Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. England’s Joshua (19-0, 19 KOs) will make a mandatory defense of his IBF heavyweight title against Bulgaria’s Pulev (25-1, 13 KOs) in a fight Showtime will televise in the United States.
“I don’t think so,” Warren told iFL TV during an interview posted Monday when asked if he thinks Joshua-Pulev belongs on pay-per-view. “But then you would say I would say that. But I don’t think so. But they’ll get away with it. Do you think it’s pay-per-view? I don’t think it is. But they’ll get away with it.”
Warren, who has been criticized at times for promoting too many pay-per-view shows, feels the same way about the Joseph Parker-Hughie Fury fight. That bout, which Parker won by majority decision to retain his WBO heavyweight title September 23 in Manchester, was televised via YouTube for £14.99.
“It wasn’t pay-per-view,” Warren said. “Peter Fury’s a good friend and we promote Hughie. But I didn’t think it was pay-per-view. But then, I don’t know what the numbers are. I’ve got no idea what it’s done. And I think the other side of pay-per-view, when you’re doing these shows, is getting the exposure. And it’s whether Hughie got the exposure, or in other fights, because you wanna be seen. If you start limiting it to pay-per-view and say you do 100,000 buys or 150,000 buys, you’re not delivering the exposure to the boxers.”
Boxing pay-per-view shows cost less in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Those cards in the UK often cost £19.95 (roughly $26.50), whereas pay-per-view events in the United States this year have ranged from $69.95 to $99.95 to watch in HD.
Even though UK pay-per-views are cheaper than in the U.S., Warren wants fewer of them. He can’t understand why upcoming World Boxing Super Series bouts between IBO super middleweight champ Chris Eubank Jr. (25-1, 19 KOs) and Turkey’s Avni Yildirim (16-0, 10 KOs) – scheduled for Saturday in Stuttgart, Germany – and WBA super middleweight champ George Groves (26-3, 19 KOs) and Jamie Cox (24-0, 13 KOs) – set for October 14 in London – will headline pay-per-view cards in the United Kingdom.
“There are far too many,” Warren said. “And the public’s only got a certain amount of money to spend, so they’re gonna get fussy where they spend their money. And some of those fights are just not pay-per-view. That’s a fact of life. And everybody talks pay-per-view. I was talking about it earlier.
“I mean, you’ve gotta have some pay-per-view. Otherwise, you cannot put on the events that the fighters want. You cannot take them into the big time, where they should be, where they should be getting money. It goes without saying, the fight between Golovkin and Canelo was a pay-per-view fight. You can’t say it wasn’t a pay-per-view fight. It was. Those other fights you mentioned are not pay-per-view fights.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
