Eddie Hearn has hit back at Bob Arum’s criticism of Sky Sports, claiming the veteran US promoter had tried to persuade the network to put on next month’s Terence Crawford-Kell Brook fight as a pay-per-view.
Arum, the Top Rank CEO and chairman, blasted Sky Sports this week during a media call for the upcoming Vasiliy Lomachenko-Teofimo Lopez fight claiming it was “immoral” to put on three pay-per-view shows between now and Christmas at a time when people are struggling financially due to the coronavirus pandemic.
But Hearn says that Arum was merely upset that Sky Sports had not met their expectations when making an offer to show Lomachenko-Lopez. He also claimed that Arum had been looking to put that fight on pay-per-view in the US, but it was only low predicted sales figures that saw them change their mind.
“I just laugh,” Hearn told BoxingScene.com when asked for a reaction to Arum’s outburst. “It is bizarre. On the one hand you have Todd Duboef (Top Rank’s president) phoning Sky saying ‘We just want to do business with Sky’, on the other hand you have Bob Arum saying ‘I never want to do business with Sky again’.
“There is no one more committed to boxing than Sky over the years. Others have popped in when it is sexy, but over the years Sky have been there. But just because you are putting a fight on, it doesn’t mean a broadcaster is obligated to buy it.
“He couldn’t believe that no broadcaster, and it is not just Sky, wanted to buy that fight. It is not that it isn’t a good fight, but he punted it out everywhere – us, BT, ITV, Channel 5, everywhere. And he couldn’t get any customers, so he sulked.
“They did the same thing with Terence Crawford-Kell Brook. And Arum says Sky only want to do pay-per-views, Arum was trying to get Sky to do Brook-Crawford on pay-per-view. They turned that down. They said they would buy the fight in any case and they came up with a ridiculous number and Sky now aren’t interested in that fight either.”
The Lomachenko-Lopez fight will now be shown on FITE TV in the UK, with fans having to pay £9.99 to watch. Hearn says he did make an offer for the fight to be on Sky Sports.
“Sky have a commitment to boxing, which is the budget they give to Matchroom,” Hearn said. “I made Arum an offer for Lomachenko-Lopez, which probably wasn’t dissimilar to the one he ended up taking, but by then he had had gone. At the moment, no one is looking to spend above and beyond what they are already committed to, in any business.
“It was a case of ‘here is our offer, I would rather spend our money on primetime boxing and our stable, but this is what we will offer’. The same for Brook-Crawford. We haven’t even made an offer yet and I don’t know where it will be aired.”
Hearn said the likelihood is that a fight that would be aired in the middle of the night could not hope to get the ratings to make it financially viable.
“Consistently we have seen, boxing at 3 or 4 in the morning doesn’t rate,” he said. “Especially as no one is going out now. So, it is not like people are bowling in from a club at 1am or 2am, everyone is at home and going to bed early.
“It is not a reflection of the quality of the fight, it’s a great fight, but in this market, (Luke) Campbell-Lomachenko was one of our poorest pay-per-views and no one knows who Teofimo Lopez is.
“As a hardcore fight fan, I think it’s a fantastic fight. But the hardcore fanbase is extremely small.
“[Arum] tried to for Lomachenko-Lopez as a pay-per-view [in the US], it was only when they realised it would not do a lot of buys that they put it on normal ESPN.
“He did Crawford and [Amir] Khan on pay-per-view and everyone seems to have forgotten that Lomachenko-Lopez is on pay-per-view in the UK.”
Ron Lewis is a senior writer for Boxing Scene. He was Boxing Correspondent for The Times, where he worked from 2001-2019 - covering four Olympic Games and numerous world title fights across the globe. He has written about boxing for a wide variety of publications worldwide since the 1980s.
