because Spence is a part of the deep Premier Boxing Champions staple of welterweights while Crawford is aligned with Top Rank.Īnd you can add into the confusion for casual consumers the politics of sanctioning bodies. This leads to situations such as Terence Crawford being kept away from a fight with Errol Spence Jr. Promoters are often reluctant to work together to make big fights happen. This becomes especially true as you work through the reasons many of the sport's biggest or most interesting fights don't happen. With an aggressive UFC schedule that puts an event on nearly every weekend and with meaningful action up and down the card, boxing's various promoters failing to change their approach to the game has clearly done damage to the sport. Boxing's biggest stars were relegated to top-heavy and increasingly expensive pay-per-view cards that lacked a true "bang for your buck" feeling as longtime fans yearned for the days of Don King promoted PPV cards featuring meaningful action from top to bottom. Mixed martial arts - or, more specifically, the UFC - have been cutting into boxing's interest for years, and it's not hard to understand why. Networks and streaming services have long tried using boxing as a programming staple with diminishing returns. This has led to lawsuits from Canelo to DAZN, Golden Boy and Golden Boy CEO Oscar De La Hoya.Ĭanelo has been tied at various points in 2020 to fights with Sergiy Derevyanchenko, Jason Quigley, John Ryder, Callum Smith and Billy Joe Saunders, none of which materialized and none of which met the suddenly-strict DAZN rules for "premier" opposition. Now, DAZN has claimed that Alvarez's previous bouts did not fit the criteria - largely a product of its desire to stream the third fight between Alvarez and their other big signing, Gennadiy Golovkin - and refused to pay $35 million for his next fight, offering roughly half the expected base pay. A planned spring bout with Billy Joe Saunders was tanked by the COVID-19 pandemic, but a fall or winter return has seemed less likely over recent months as various opponents have been floated only to see a deal never hit the table.Ī report by The Athletic stated the crux of the issue was DAZN and Alvarez promoter Golden Boy not agreeing on what constitutes a "premier opponent." That ambiguous term was to be defined by DAZN on a case-by-case basis, with Alvarez and Golden Boy obligated to deliver at least one such fight annually. Less than two years later, Alvarez has sued DAZN - among others - and the deal stands out as another example of the myriad ways boxing can't get out of its own way.Īlvarez's deal called for 10 fights over five years, but he has only fought three times over the first 23 months. HBO had decided to get out of the boxing game after being its biggest player for decades, and upstart streaming service DAZN swooped in to sign the sport's biggest star, Saul "Canelo" Alvarez, for $365 million over five years. In October 2018, the boxing landscape changed significantly.
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