PROJECT POWER
Eddie Hearn reveals his plan to take control of the boxing world
IT FEELS WEIRD. I NEVER SET OUT TO BE A MEME. I NEVER SET OUT TO BE A SOCIAL MEDIA STAR. BUT I JUST ROLL WITH THINGS”
THE first time Boxing News met Eddie Hearn he told us that Audley Harrison was going to win the world heavyweight title. Eleven years after that infamous prophecy, the promoter wants to discuss his latest venture: Hearn – older, wiser and even more confident – is preparing to take over the boxing world.
It’s another audacious plan and this one, Hearn promises, is worth listening to. Since he hauled Harrison out of the wilderness and into a three-round drubbing at the fists of David Haye, Hearn has seen his stock rise dramatically. “I am never doing this again,” Eddie muttered to himself as he was booed out of the Manchester Arena in the winter of 2010 following Haye’s victory. But getting the floundering Harrison into position just to challenge for a title would be the catalyst for Hearn’s own rebirth.
Today, Eddie Hearn is not only one of the most influential boxing promoters on the planet, he’s a worldwide brand. He can boast millions of social media followers, a best-selling book, a chart-topping podcast and the No Context Hearn memes go viral in seconds. Consequently, Hearn is arguably as recognisable as any of the fighters he represents, Anthony Joshua and Canelo Alvarez included.
“It feels weird,” Hearn tells Boxing News when asked about his celebrity status. “I can’t say it wasn’t intentional. But I never set out to be a meme, I never set out to be a social media star or a brand ambassador or a podcast presenter or an author. But I kind of just roll with things. I wanted to create my own identity because I feel that in any major global sport, particularly fight sports, you have that central figure, the orchestrator, the conductor that sits at the top and plans and strategises and creates this world and this global schedule.
“Intentionally, I will step back at times because I want the fighters to have the limelight. I will get criticised because I’m in the limelight more than my fighters, and I don’t like that but, sometimes, that’s how things progress. I have to use what I have to the benefit of my fighters – if I’ve got a million followers on Instagram and a million followers on Twitter and I’ve got a fighter who has 5,000 then I have to use my own platform.”
That platform, he says, will be the key to world domination. This year has seen the launch of Matchroom Media that will allow the organisation to ramp up the exposure for Hearn, his boxers and the sport. If successful, it gives the brand what every brand desires: Independence. And in a boxing world with so many moving parts, independence represents a huge advantage over any of his promotional rivals.
Hearn isn’t looking to wipe out those rivals but, with a straight face, he insists he could do exactly that.
“We could go out tomorrow and acquire all the other companies in boxing, we could raise the finances to buy everybody – but that’s boring,” Hearn says. “I would like to see a natural progression; it’s not about putting people out of business, it’s just about taking over and taking over globally. If we limit ourselves to just the UK and the USA, which are key markets admittedly, we’re missing a trick. Australia is a sleeping giant, Germany used to have terrestrial broadcasts and get millions of viewers, Scandanavia – sleeping giant, Mexico, which is the home of boxing as far as I’m concerned. Canada. Poland. Kazakhstan.
“Realistically, I could create offices in so many different places. I could open an office in Australia and sign 12 fighters today. Normally you go into these territories with a broadcaster and we’re in a position now with DAZN to do that. It’s a fantastic product. You look at the territories, you can see where the subscribers are coming from. Then you react to those new acquisitions. The key to success is not just to be reactive, but super-reactive.”
Reactive to the needs of his fighters, too. Hearn stresses that he will do whatever it takes to keep his stars happy, make the fights they want and the sport needs, even if that means sharing them with rival promoters and networks in the short-term.
“I don’t feel like we necessarily need to sign fighters and lock them into long deals. We can have floating fighters, like Canelo Alvarez [who in January signed a two-fight deal with Matchroom]. He comes in and fights Callum Smith, Avni Yildirim and Billy Joe Saunders. Then he wants Caleb Plant. But Caleb Plant is with PBC so if we can’t make that fight on our platforms we will go collectively with Canelo and make the fight on Fox. You can’t let your ego get out of control and stop fighters from going here or there. This is the platform and this is what we’ve got to do.”
In June, Matchroom Boxing’s current five-year deal with Sky Sports expires and could, if Hearn decides not to renew, end a lengthy exclusive contract with the broadcaster. The Matchroom Boxing empire is growing internationally and in every territory bar the UK the promoter works with DAZN. It’s a conflict of interests that Hearn, while still at the negotiating table with his current employer, is acutely aware of.
“It’s a very difficult decision that’s incoming,” Hearn says. “We’ve got six months to go on our contract with Sky. We’re in deep discussions about extending that. We are also having conversations with DAZN. And we go back to, ‘You are not just aligning with some British boxing, you are aligning with a stable, with Matchroom, with Eddie Hearn and the huge noise and cavalry that comes with it.’ It’s a very tough decision for us because Sky, as they have been in many of our sports, have been a huge part of our success. Without Sky, we wouldn’t be where we are. But I need a partner that sees my vision and I need a partner that is prepared to invest in that vision. That vision isn’t just being limited to ‘six shows here and four shows there’. It is the launch of Matchroom Media; we want to do the production, we want to create 24/7 [documentaries] for every show, we want to create our own talk show once a week, we want to create all of our own social media content. When you create a narrative, it has to be a ‘cradle to grave’ mindset. We create the event, the narrative and see the whole journey through.
“Sky’s production is excellent. It’s not like we want to take over the production because we don’t think Sky is excellent but we need to control that narrative. That’s not because we only want certain people to contribute and they have to say certain things, not at all, it’s just that I need to create that whole process from start to finish. I want more investment in content. I want to bring back Ringside. I want to spend almost as much money on content and shoulder programming and telling the whole story. I’m not saying Sky don’t want to do that, but it’s a different kind of deal. This deal is not just about the money, it’s about the vision that I have for the sport. We all know that Sky have the best platform for pay-per-view, we all know they have an incredible brand, they have great cross promotion across other sports, we couldn’t be happier with them and that’s the truth. Now we have to see what’s right for the business, for our fighters and it has to align and match up.
“But it’s true, that one boxing platform would be a lot easier if we were on that one platform globally. At the moment we’re saying, ‘Watch Sky Sports in the UK’ and people will message me and ask if they can watch it on DAZN. All I will say is we’ve got a very difficult decision on our hands but we are very happy where we are.”
Perhaps Hearn’s greatest success has been his ability to draw the masses to the sport with the biggest fights and the Sky Sports machine has been a huge driver in that. But Hearn insists that lesser fights –
even trade fights with the right story – can be crossover successes if marketed differently.
“We need to align content with different platforms,” Hearn explains. “So if DAZN are growing their subscription base in a certain territory, that content has to sit on different platforms in that territory. That’s difficult with Sky Sports because they will want that content to sit [exclusively] on Sky Sports, and there is an argument for that. But I would like to see certain content – say for Josh Kelly-conor Benn if we get that far – sitting on the BBC. So, for example, the BBC or ITV or Netflix show the 24/7style programmes. Then the tentacles reach out and grow, draw in new audiences. If you just show the promotional shows on Sky or DAZN, okay you might get 100,000 viewers but those viewers are already ‘in’. What you have to do is use the content on other platforms to attract people who are not already subscribed and would already watch the fight regardless. It won’t just help the growth of the fight, it will help the growth of the sport.”
It’s the Monday morning before Hearn will promote the first British boxing show of the year on Sky. The snow is falling outside the stableconverted offices which sit alongside the sprawling Matchroom HQ in Brentwood and the weather is threatening to play havoc with the undercard of Josh Warrington’s first bout since 2019. Flights that will transport opponents to London are being cancelled and Hearn’s phone, which is never far from his fingertips, lights up with alerts and calls countless times during our conversation.
Hearn insists he reads “everything”, whether that’s messages, tweets or articles, and he takes the good with the bad. During the last decade, Eddie has seen his reputation among the hardcore soar and then plummet after a series of pay-per-view events left plenty of fans feeling like they were being exploited alongside concerns expressed on these pages that the model marginalises the sport. Hearn understands the criticism more than one might expect.
“How do we get to a level where those fights that attract 250-300,000 pay-per-view buys are not pay-per-view fights? That’s always the argument. Is Usyk-chisora or Whyte-povetkin really worthy of payper-view? The answer is it does 300,000 buys, so yeah.