Mayweather ‘blindsided’ by changes
Alvarez’s streaming deal proves boxing moving on from pay-per-view model Morgan Campbell
When the sports streaming service DAZN announced it had signed Mexican boxing star Saul (Canelo) Alvarez to an 11-fight, $365-million contract, retired fight legend Floyd Mayweather reacted as we would expect.
First came an Instagram post pointing out that his last cable deal — $240 million (all dollars U.S.) over six bouts on Showtime — was worth more per fight than Alvarez’s DAZN contract. Then came an old photo of Alvarez’s promoter, Oscar De La Hoya, posing in lingerie, with Mayweather asking followers to leave demeaning captions.
If Mayweather’s second post was predictably crass, his next move was downright puzzling. Sunday, Mayweather announced he’d face 20-year-old kickboxing star Tenshin Nasukawa in a big-money crossover bout with Rizin, a Japanese mixed marital arts promotion. It was a strange move from a 41-year-old fighter who maintains he’s rich enough to live lavishly for a lifetime, and the news conference announcing the bout was slim on specifics. Nothing firm on the bout’s rules or contracted weight.
Those details were never settled.
By Wednesday afternoon, Mayweather posted on Instagram that he had agreed to a big-money, small-audience exhibition — but never to an actual fight on a pay-per-view card, and that Rizin tried to trick him into the Nasukawa fight.
Whether Rizin really did dupe Mayweather or simply didn’t meet his demands, the episode highlights how even the single biggest name in boxing is struggling to keep pace in a shifting industry. Where Mayweather Promotions depends on its founder’s star power, competing promoters have noticed the sport’s viewers moving online and are working aggressively to meet them there.
Cable sports giant ESPN has moved premium boxing content — including bouts involving welterweight star Terence Crawford — to its subscription-only ESPN-plus app. As cord-cutters cost ESPN revenue, decision-makers hope marquee fighters such as Crawford and undefeated Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko will attract fight fans who don’t mind paying for reliable, legal streams.
The same strategy underpins DAZN’s big bets on boxing.
Earlier this year, the streaming service announced an eight-year, $1-billion agreement with U.K-based promoter Eddie Hearn. That deal gives DAZN exclusive rights to heavyweight superstar Anthony Joshua and allowed Hearn to expand his presence in the U.S., where DAZN launched this past September.
Then came the Alvarez deal and a clear message to the rest of the boxing industry: the old premium cable and pay-perview model is heading out of style.
HBO will abandon its longstanding boxing program later this month, after a light-heavy- weight title bout between Dmitry Bivol and Montreal’s Jean Pascal. That move will leave Showtime as the last major player using a strategy that involves building fighters into prime-time stars on premium cable, then selling their most meaningful fights on pay-per-view.
Other boxing industry heavyweights are shifting their efforts to live streams, hoping the mix of broad audiences and affordable subscriptions will generate both the revenue to justify the investment and the publicity to build new stars.
Mayweather, meanwhile, followed a well-worn path to boxing stardom, earning bronze at the 1996 Olympics and running off a string of big wins on HBO. He became the sport’s most recognizable figure after a mid-career rebrand — transforming from Pretty Boy Floyd to Money Mayweather, the loud, arrogant, trash-talking heel who defeated De La Hoya in 2007. His tactical, defence-first style wouldn’t otherwise attract casual boxing fans, but he stoked hatred in fans who would pay to see him lose. Except he always won. But where Mayweather mastered selling himself to a mainstream sports audience drawn to his bombast, his own promotional stable lacks the star power and sustainability his competitors are selling to broadcast platforms. When Badou Jack and Adonis Stevenson fought for a lightheavyweight title in Toronto in May, the promotion leaned heavily on the presence of Mayweather, who promotes Jack, to sell tickets and attract mainstream press attention.
Mayweather protégé Gervonta Davis possesses the building blocks of bigger stardom — and undefeated record and fast, aggressive style, plus links to celebrities such as Mayweather and Drake. But Mayweather and Davis feud constantly over social media, making it unclear how long their business relationship will last.
And while his promotional competitors press forward, Mayweather dabbles in rumours that prove general sports fans still harbour an unfulfilled longing to see him vanquished. When he teased old foil Manny Pacquiao about the possibility of a December rematch, sports media outlets reported the taunt as if it were news and not just Mayweather talking trash.
The announcement of the Nasukawa fight came with a poster and a press conference and seemed legitimate, even if it was novelty fight. But Mayweather now says Rizin roped him into promoting their New Year’s Eve show, knowing he had never agreed to an official bout. His Instagram post explaining the fiasco says he felt “blindsided.”
And the situation highlights how different the business of boxing is from the craft of it.
In the ring, Mayweather always saw those punches coming.