Comments Thread For: Team Sauerland, SPORT1 Agree on Three Year TV Deal

[gee73]

Thanks alot for the info man! Really nice.
So what does this in general mean for boxing in Germany overall?

Are the days with the big events gone? Remeber in the 90's and 00's their shows where huge and big ratings.
How are the ratings and audience on Sport1 compared with Sat.1?

The deal means for boxing in Germany that it is not dead.

There are not that many big events anymore. Sturm is gone, Abraham is pretty much gone. Huck is at the tail-end of his career. Klitschkos are gone. Brähmer is a draw in Eastern-Germany. Feigenbutz disqualified himself really early from being a draw. Zeuge fights not regularly enough. Culcay disappointed too often.

The 90's and 00's shows were big and had huge audiences but the audience has gotten a lot older since then. Not a lot of young boxing fans. The bigger boxing shows nowadays have an average age of maybe 50. A big problem is the lack of advertising. Eubank vs. Yildirim (promoted by Sauerland) was in Stuttgart. I work in Stuttgart and there was no visible advertising at all. For a tournament with 'the biggest prize in boxing'. The Sauerlands (Kalle and Nisse) got out of touch with the Germans, living in London. Their father Wilfried handled it better.

[gee73]

I was always amazed at how Sturm was able to get TV deals and venues without any promotional help

That was relatively easy for him. He already got good paydays early in his career with Universum Box-Promotion. When he was in a legal clinch with them and had to sit out more than one year it is said that he teamed up with Ahmet Öner (Yildirim's crazy promoter) to bribe people at the WBA to give him the super-title, avoiding being stripped or being pressured into fighting Golovkin who at that time fought for Sturm's old promoter.

Sturm was represented by one of the leading sports marketing companies in Germany, helping him to and a deal with Sat.1 who paid him a truckload of money per fight (comparison: if you fought on HBO as a middleweight at the same time, you got a fraction of Strums money). Getting the venues is not that much of a problem once you have the right people and money around you.