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After 45 years, over 1,000 fights and some of the most lucrative and contested matches of all time, HBO is throwing sponge on professional boxing.
What began with a monumental upset seen by a handful of customers – the knockout of heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, George Foreman in 1973 – will end in late 2018. The network has no boxing shows Madison Square Garden on October 27th.
Peter Nelson, the 37-year-old executive vice president of HBO Sports, announced Thursday morning at a meeting with HBO Boxing production staff that the network was dropping boxing. The staff at HBO Boxing includes announcer Jim Lampley, analyst Max Kellerman, scorer Harold Lederman and former boxing champions Andre Ward and Roy Jones Jr., who work for HBO as independent commentators. Staff announcing, only Lampley should stay with HBO.
"It's not a subjective decision," said Nelson in a recent interview. "Our audience study informs us that boxing is no longer a determining factor for subscribing to HBO."
The decision goes against a recent influx of investors and broadcasters in boxing and the much greater availability of fights on various digital platforms.
"I think it's a good time for boxing and being a fight fan," said British boxing promoter Eddie Hearn, whose Matchroom Boxing promotional company recently signed a deal. billion dollars with DAZN. new digital platform, to televise the fights over the next eight years.
DAZN represents the next wave of boxing programming. Its streaming service will cost $ 9.99 per month and will be available via the Internet and smartphone apps. DAZN debuted last Saturday with a heavy fight between Anthony Joshua and Alexander Povetkin in front of 80,000 fans at Wembley Stadium in London. According to Hearn, a million fans have watched Joshua's victory on various DAZN platforms.
Add to that the four-year deal signed this month between Fox Sports and Premier Boxing Champions, which controls many of the best players in the sport, and it looks like others are entering the fighting game just when HBO was coming out.
This may have more to do with HBO than with boxing. In the 1980s and 1990s, viewers were drawn to the dramatic clashes between Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Oscar De La Hoya and especially Mike Tyson, who participated in 16 HBO shows. More recently, according to Nelson, viewers are now listing the original programming such as "Game of Thrones" or the recent HBO Sports "Being Serena" television series – a five-episode series about marriage, pregnancy and returning to tennis. Serena Williams. reasons to subscribe.
In addition to the biggest fights, boxing has recently struggled to penetrate the discussion about sports in general.
"There is a lot of boxing out there," Nelson said. "But what we have not seen is a lot of signature destination fights."
When Tyson, 20, became the youngest heavyweight champion in history by eliminating Trevor Berbick in 1986, he did it on HBO. His loss against Buster Douglas in Tokyo was an HBO fight. The same goes for the June 1990 fight between Meldrick Taylor and Julio César Chávez. The other memorable bouts – Hagler-Leonard, Hagler-Thomas Hearns and Leonard-Hearns – were closed-circuit television shows produced by HBO, which were then broadcast to a wide audience on HBO.
These fights sometimes attract up to a third of HBO's national subscribers, or about 15 million people at the time. Now this base is about 40 million, but according to Nielsen, HBO boxing shows in 2018 averaged about 820,000 viewers, or about 2% of the total audience.
The most watched live fight on HBO in 2018, a bout of middleweight titles between Gennady Golovkin and Vanes Martirosyan, drew 1.3 million viewers. But a super-weight fight, touted as a HBO event on September 8, reached 349,000 spectators, making it one of the lowest-rated boxing matches in HBO history.
This decline in the number of viewers, apparent in recent years, was the last asset of Nelson. Boxing was no longer a profitable investment for HBO; André le Géant's documentary last April, for example, attracted about seven million viewers at a cost well below the $ 1.5 to $ 3 million generally needed to produce a boxing match.
"Because of our association with boxing, people forget that we are not a sports network," Nelson said. "We are a storytelling platform."
Some episodes of "Game of Thrones" attract tens of millions of listeners. And HBO Sports has high expectations for "The Shop", a newly launched talk show that takes place in a hair salon and is produced by and stars LeBron James.
HBO's only association with boxing in 2019 will be a two-part documentary about Muhammad Ali, James being the executive producer. Still, the prospect that HBO would soon be out of boxing seemed unthinkable for some industry insiders.
"As a person who helped build their boxing legacy, it would break my heart," said Lou DiBella, who was vice president of the HBO during the boxing age of the network.
Nelson left the door open for a possible return to the ring one day after the last scheduled match of the network next month: a middleweight bout between Daniel Jacobs and Sergiy Derevyanchenko. A clash between Joshua and Deontay Wilder, for example, could tempt HBO, he admits, if only for one night.
"I'm still a boxing fan," Nelson said. "If there is a destination event, absolutely, we are in this conversation."
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