Crawford's guaranteed $3.625M for the Benavidez fight

[Pigeons]

It's only on the app and not on ESPN?

Crawford-Benavidez is on ESPN. Crawford's previous fight against Horn was on ESPN+.

[Chrismart]

Not bad at all.

[N/A]

Wow! That is very good money for a regular basic cable fight. There is no way in the world that the premium HBO network would have matched that type of licensing fee but ESPN can and are.

no. top rank loses a lot of money on every crawford fight. what ESPN pays is never going to be enough to cover a crawford event. he's in tim bradley territory. the guy top rank over pays to stay relevant in the division.

[elfag]

Creative accounting is an art. Every major business uses creative accounting to minimize liabilities. Multi million dollar athletes are no different.

So there are a million ways to manipulate the purse. I'll give you some basic examples. Let's say fighter X is guaranteed $5 million per fight by his promoter. His promoter can pay fighter X $2 million to fight and $3 million to be hired as a spokesman to help market the fight. Thus the commission and sanctioning body, as well as possibly his trainer, are only getting a percentage of his "purse" of $2 million, while having no claim on his $3 million "marketing agreement."

Or, promoter pays $5 million to a shell company owned by fighter X to make fighter X available for the fight. Fighter X than pays himself $2 million to be hired by his own company to fight, thus making $2 million his "purse" while the other $3 million is corporate income, which you can then write off all sorts of expenses, not to mention be taxed at the lower corporate tax rate.

I can give you a million examples, but some of them are a little more borderline in terms of legality, so I'll just give you one more safe one since the game is to be sold, not to be told.

Promoter has the fighter "co-promote" the event. He's still essentially guaranteed $5 million, but you file $2 million as the purse. Then in the co-promotion agreement, the company of fighter X is entitled to the first $3 million of income from the promotion. So the fighter is taking no risk, but that $3 million is coming in as promotional income, and the fighter can even write off a bunch of bogus expenses from the promotion of the event.

These are just some very basic examples, but you get the idea.

How common are lawsuits against the fighters, from the people they must pay?

You could skim some and rip people off to where it isnt worth it for them to pay a lawyer to come after you. But if you are taking half their pay and its obvious, then I could see them being sued. If a trainer is supposed to get 10% of the purse and the promoter pays the fighter 50% of their pay as a promoter, cutting out the trainer from taking his 10% on half of the fighters earnings, Im sure the trainer could sue and argue that the fighter didnt work much as a promoter and it was intentionally done to deny the trainer 50% of his pay.

[Gpabrooklyn]

You the only person on this forum that actually understand the business of boxing,I dont know why these fools dont get that filed purses are not always what they say,if crawford gets 3.6 million he gotta pay taxes,sanctioning fees,his three trainers he got,all that comes out the purse,so he probably leaves with the 2 million it says,if you notice most Haymon fighters start the own promotional company so al can manipulate the numbers and take away some of those fees,so Haymon fighters get paid way more than recorded purses as eddie Hearn found out

[Bjl12]

Why would he want to get in the ring with Spence, Thurman, and Pacquiao if he already making this type of money for a fight that his 100-1 favor

Funniest part is...he does want to fight them. They dont want to fight him...

Other side of street....lmfaoooo....so sad.

[BLACK KNOT]

Do you support Bob Arum overpaying his fighters to be in mismatches?

arum treats his fighters better though earn with arum!!!

[sicko]

Was smart for him to Re-Sign with Top Rank if he is getting that amount of money to fight Benavidez good for Crawford

[Southpawology]

overpaid HYPE JOB

[PittsburghKid]

Also, I'm guessing this is also because he's fighting on the ESPN app. Top Rank is likely giving him an incentive to fight on the app by sweetening the pot.

Meanwhile Lomachenko fighting on regular ESPN is only getting $1M.

So please no more crap about how Lomachenko is getting preferential treatment.

There's a reason they're getting paid this way.

Cool, except he's fighting on ESPN not ESPN+.