At a time when we are being sold something every day – whether a podcast, OF, CBD, or AI – it was kind of refreshing to hear Frank Warren subvert the game of grift and deliver the great anti-sell ahead of Fabio Wardley’s fight against Joseph Parker on Saturday. Even though it was Warren himself who was tasked with promoting the event, he couldn’t have cared less whether you bought what he was selling or not.
“If you don’t want to watch it, you won’t pay for it, will you?” he said, eyes locked on the young interviewer who had dared question the quality of his latest pay-per-view. “It’s a pay-per-view fight. If you don’t want to buy it, don’t buy it.
Enraged by the very suggestion that he was serving up slop, Warren refused to even indulge the question. He also refused to entertain the idea that he needed to sell something many felt was not worth the price at which it was being sold: £24.99/$59.99. Why that is, one can only speculate – stubbornness, exasperation, your guess is as good as mine – but it made for an amusing and revealing interaction all the same.
After all, to see a promoter decline to promote is to see a man standing outside a restaurant in a tourist trap avoiding eye contact with you instead of begging you to enter their establishment. Rather than thrust their menu towards you, you instead watch them drop it on the floor, shrug their shoulders, and say: “If you don’t want to eat here, don’t eat here. There are lots of other options for you.”
In other words, declining to sell is incongruous in the world in which Frank Warren exists. He is, by definition, a promoter and a promoter promotes. They sell. They create. They sometimes even lie.
For reminders of this, he has Eddie Hearn, his one-time rival and now friend, who does his best to flog similar products in similar fight-week interviews on a semi-regular basis. Occasionally these products Hearn will believe in and speak with the conviction of that belief. Yet there are surely other times too when Hearn, like Warren, knows he is up against it, in terms of convincing people, and may even have to convince himself before he is able to attempt convincing others.
Regardless, Hearn treats it as a game and really goes for it. Warren, on the other hand, a man from a different time and cut from a different cloth, seemed affronted by the very challenge and therefore bit. To him, it was not a game. It was instead something to ignore, avoid. “Next question,” he said.
In fairness to Warren, the fight itself – Wardley vs Parker – did deliver on the night. Whether that meant it was worth the price people had to pay to watch it is another question, but at the very least few afterwards would have hounded the promoter about the price the way they did in the days leading up to the event. After all, once the night is over, the only thing that really matters is how one feels when going home or off to bed. In this instance, most who watched Wardley vs Parker on DAZN, whether legally or illegally, will have been satisfied by what they had witnessed by the time they fell asleep.
Prior to the main event, though, the overriding emotion for all those watching was one of confusion. There was confusion regarding why Wardley vs Parker was deemed a pay-per-view headliner in the first place, and people were even more confused by the fact it had not been suitably supported by an undercard capable of picking up the slack. This confusion then turned to concern on the night when faded British heavyweights Derek Chisora and Dillian Whyte were trotted out before the main event, with the prospect of a third fight between them waved before the audience like a dentist’s drill.
The pair’s last fight, of course, took place all the way back in 2018, and since then both men have only grown older and more fearful of the inevitable: retirement. Now, should they fight, it is not so much the conclusion of a rivalry as a stay of execution. Worst of all, if you have even the slightest interest in saying goodbye, you will have to pay through the nose for the questionable privilege.
Because that, too, is likely to be a pay-per-view offering at some point. It ticks all the boxes, it features two relatively big domestic names, and the bar has been set so low now it would seem almost a missed opportunity if those involved didn’t try to squeeze more money from fans for the right to watch it.
Besides, with other revenue streams now available to UK promoters, the trust and goodwill of fans has never been less vital to their business than it is today. That’s why ticket sales are no longer considered as crucial as they once were – before the era of Riyadh Season and Saudi sponsorship – and the same goes for pay-per-view numbers too. If anything, the money generated from ticket sales and pay-per-views in 2025 is merely a nice little bonus for many of the people thriving at the top end of the sport these days. Even if they were to lose money on a show, there are now various ways for them to recoup what they have lost if they cultivate the right relationships and shake the right hands.
For fans, this means a mix of fine dining and fast-food slop, often sold at the same price. It also means that their approval, and indeed their star review, carries only a fraction of the weight it would have carried in the past. Eat or don’t eat, it hardly matters in 2025. That message is loud and clear. In fact, the whole war between promoters and fans becomes a phony one when you accept that the promoters are not that bothered by the lack of quality and the fans, who claim to be bothered, are often watching pay-per-views by illegal means anyway. It is, in the end, just lip service, grandstanding on the part of both.
That said, it’s still a little weird, the drop in standards. On Saturday night, for example, I logged on just in time to catch the second half of the chief support contest to Wardley vs Parker and was immediately shocked to realise I knew neither of the two boxers in the ring. Even when seeing their names up on screen – Juergen Uldedaj and Rolly Lambert – I was, I’ll be honest, none the wiser. Cruiserweights, apparently.
Now, ordinarily, this would be no cause for concern. It would instead just highlight my own depleting knowledge of the sport and an all-too-common blind spot. However, when it comes to pay-per-view events, there was a time when you could once be sure of a certain familiarity with all the key fighters involved. You might not have fancied a particular fight on the card, but by the time you got to the chief support bout, the second-best fight of the night, you would know the names and histories of the two fighters featured and you would begin to feel the magnitude of it all.
That this was lacking on Saturday is no fault of either Uldedaj and Lambert, of course. They were just in there fighting, doing their best. But it did, I think, speak to the plummeting standards of pay-per-views, both in the UK and generally, and suggest that even the so-called “stacked” pay-per-views of old – where essentially six or seven decent fights would compensate for the lack of one world-class fight – are almost now obsolete.
Still, with no option but to wait, I watched them on Saturday. For six rounds I watched Juergen Uldedaj and Rolly Lambert deliver the kind of fight you would expect from two fighters you had previously never heard of and I watched an OnlyFans logo flash up on screen at regular intervals during the bout. At first, its presence seemed in bad taste – one more sign of how far we, as a society, have fallen – yet, the more I thought about it, the more appropriate it started to feel. In fact, it could be argued that never has a sponsor been more on brand for a sport like boxing than OnlyFans. For years the sport has been spreading its cheeks for pay, in private, and the good thing now, thanks to other sports doing the same, is that it is fine to do it publicly, proudly. Now it’s actually deemed empowering – the spreading, the flaunting – and is embraced rather than shamed by fans and people who should know better. If ever in doubt, just look at all the great fights being made and how each of them is received. Look at how many fighters are getting the chance of a lifetime to visit the Middle East and return with a sack full of money and their dignity still intact.
The only worry at this point, perhaps, is oversaturation: too much spreading, too much flaunting. In a world already swarming with content, sex, and violence, how much interest will there be in the likes of Whyte and Chisora hauling their sagging flesh to a webcam and putting on a sad show for a diminishing subscriber base? In the event of that, does a niche sport conspire to make itself even more niche? Does it further alienate itself from the masses? Who, if anyone, now actually watches that sort of thing? Who pays for it? Is it only freaks, sickos, and perverts at this stage? Is it only fans?
