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I’m not criticising his business enterprise, he’s clearly been successful in the UK at least, but it’s clear he’s happy to disparage the sport in the process. The way he’s manipulated the casual market is clever but it’s not been good for British boxing and the decline in standard of PPV cards and even regular Sky cards corroborate that. If you look at Sky boxing now, they rarely ever show male world title fights on non PPV, they rarely show any international fights now cause the casuals have no interest and even the more enticing domestic matchups generally end up on PPV undercards. It’s seems anything worth watching is now behind a paywall.
It’s the business model which is a huge issue. They’re extracting money from the sport without putting it back in. Sky used to be showing Carl Froch in world title fights as part of the subscription, now anything half decent is just slung on PPV and the money generated is not being used to improve the product- which completely contradicts what Hearn promised years back. “We want every fight night to feature a world title fight”. There’s been 3 in 4 years.
HBO is universally regarded as the boom period in boxing and it’s because they actually invested back into the sport. When they made crazy money on Mayweather-Pacquiao, the next week that gave us Canelo Alvarez as part of the subscription. That’s reinvesting back into the sport something Hearn/Sky never do.
It’s also all the lies and the bullsh**, Sky Sports boxing is now a narrative driven propaganda machine. Honest boxing men like Watt, McCrory etc have all been pushed out and have been replaced with ex-Matchroom stooges like Bellew and Macklin or network stooges like Adam Smith and Johnny Nelson. As a longtime British boxing fan I’m genuinely embarrassed of the product we offer at the moment.
It’s the business model which is a huge issue. They’re extracting money from the sport without putting it back in. Sky used to be showing Carl Froch in world title fights as part of the subscription, now anything half decent is just slung on PPV and the money generated is not being used to improve the product- which completely contradicts what Hearn promised years back. “We want every fight night to feature a world title fight”. There’s been 3 in 4 years.
HBO is universally regarded as the boom period in boxing and it’s because they actually invested back into the sport. When they made crazy money on Mayweather-Pacquiao, the next week that gave us Canelo Alvarez as part of the subscription. That’s reinvesting back into the sport something Hearn/Sky never do.
It’s also all the lies and the bullsh**, Sky Sports boxing is now a narrative driven propaganda machine. Honest boxing men like Watt, McCrory etc have all been pushed out and have been replaced with ex-Matchroom stooges like Bellew and Macklin or network stooges like Adam Smith and Johnny Nelson. As a longtime British boxing fan I’m genuinely embarrassed of the product we offer at the moment.
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