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Is PBC About To Shake Up The Boxing World?
Premier Boxing Champions doesn’t have a schedule past today. There are whispers of the impending demise, but there is also a rumor that this is just the beginning for the brand.
A user by the name of “fanofreason” on the
Boxing Scene message board made a post which states the following:
I work for the law firm dotting the i’s and crossing the T’s.104 shows a year x 10 years.2 month on FOXRest on FS1/affliates500 Million per year pay to PBC with 10 year guarantee. 5 Billion lifetime of contract. On par with the NHL deal with NBC.FOX gets 100% advertiser rights/revenue and 50% of venue fee.This explains the non existent fall schedule.
For those of you that just rolled your eyes or groaned or felt excitement in the pit of your stomach, all of those are appropriate responses. This is a rumor of massive proportion with far reaching implications in the world of boxing. In recent memory, nobody has flipped the traditional boxing model in this way. We all know how it works. HBO or Showtime pick and choose from fights the promoters offer. They may reject an opponent, a fighter, or a date. If they’re interested, we’ll see the fight on their network at a date to be named.
If HBO and Showtime are adamant a fight get done and the return is lucrative enough, we’ll even see the two networks come together and work as partners.
It wasn’t until Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) came in with hedge fund money, high payouts, and expensive time buys on network television did anything look any different after decades of stagnation. The ratings have been hit or miss depending on how you want to want to put them into context, but ultimately the rumors persist that the experiment is a failure.
And now with a bleak schedule which shows just one fight for the Fall months on the PBC website and only rumors of agreements between title fights in the coming months, the notion exists that the startup is circling the drain.
That is until we saw the post from Boxing Scene Forum user “Fanofreason”.
Let’s break this down line by line.
“104 shows a year x 10 years.”
We’re going to first ignore the fact that this is some random person who has provided no proof to substantiate any of his claims on the forum. Obviously doing so would probably incriminate him and probably cost him his job, but if he was truly concerned with that he probably shouldn’t have posted to begin with. If nothing else, this could be an interesting exploration on how TV deals work and if it’s a viable alternative for boxing. Either way, let’s look at the numbers.
104 shows a year. That’s 2 shows a week.
There are 149 fighters listed as being a part of the PBC stable. Many are inactive, incapable of drawing a crowd, and/or on the verge of retirement. Just a quick scroll through the stable and guys like Alfredo Angulo, Luis Collazo, and Chad Dawson likely have very little future as main event fighters capable of carrying their own cards in top tier fights in the years to come. For some they have a few, but others like Victor Ortiz are only names at this point.
But for the sake of this, let’s assume that the fighters referenced above are capable of being featured on a show that has 2 fights. That’s 4 fighters total required per card.
104 shows a year requires at least 4 fighters for the televised portions.
That means we need 416 appearances from our 149 listed PBC fighters. We can assume that not all of those appearances will be made by PBC fighters as PBC tends to work with Matchroom and other promoters.
If everyone fought twice a year that puts us at 298 appearances. Remember, we need 416. That leaves us with 118 fighters to be brought in from outside. However, prospects tend to fight more frequently and sometimes up to 4 times a year. Let’s assume that PBC has 30 prospects that are going to be fighting 4 times a year.
120 appearances for the prospects
238 appearances for everyone else
That’s 358 appearances total for the 149 fighters accounting for differing fight frequency.
At this rate it’s totally doable to see 58 fighters brought in as outside opponents.
This part seems to work out.
“2 month on FOX
Rest on FS1/affliates”
For someone who works for a law firm, this seems to be a strange use of grammar and spelling. Saying “2 month on FOX” doesn’t even make sense. Is this supposed to mean 2 total months of programming on FOX or 2 cards a month on FOX?
The difference is 8 cards or 24.
Believe it or not, the 8 cards makes a lot more sense. Let’s put it this way. The NFL owns FOX in January. College Football owns FOX from September to December. FOX also owns the rights to the World Series which begins in late October and goes into November. That leaves only 7 months out of the year where Saturday nights on FOX are viable for airing live boxing.
Let’s also mention that FOX is in year 3 of a 10 year deal with NASCAR. FOX’s deal with NASCAR covers the first half of the Sprint Cup Series which starts in February and goes into the summer before NBC takes over as FOX shifts to football.
One possible consideration we could assume FOX has is the number Errol Spence Jr vs Leonard Bundu did in August on NBC. Spence Jr-Bundu retained 6 million viewers from the gold medal match between the United States and Serbia. This could be the cornerstone of the negotiation. Boxing held onto a large portion of the audience from an Olympics basketball event and maybe FOX sees a future in having the NFL lead into it’s PBC cards on FOX. (This brings us back to the point early of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. We’ve seen PBC have a wide-range of lead-in programming.)
This brings us to our next point. (We’re going to come back to the FS1 and affiliates.)
“500 Million per year pay to PBC with 10 year guarantee. 5 Billion lifetime of contract. On par with the NHL deal with NBC.”
Is it possible that this is true? Does that money make sense?
Let’s compare other sports:
The aforementioned NASCAR deal with FOX and NBC was
$8.2 billion, 10-year deal with NBC and Fox.
FOX also landed a hard body shot on NBC in 2013 when they won the rights to broadcast the United States Golf Association tournaments which includes the U.S. Open in addition to numerous other tournaments. FOX signed a deal which started
last year for $1 billion dollars over 12 years.
NBC is currently in the midst of
a $2 billion over 10 years deal with the NHL. One could make many parallels to this deal as NHL ratings have been similar to boxing’s and this deal includes spots on both network and pay-channels.
The UFC signed a 7 year deal with FOX in 2011 that reportedly had a similar structure in how UFC programming would be dispersed across FOX’s networks. The deal was allegedly worth somewhere in the ballpark of $630 million over the course of 7 years and also will be up in the coming years. One may even see this as the blueprint and leverage point that PBC could use in projecting their valuation to FOX.
And lastly, you may have heard of the rising NBA salary cap this past summer. That jump was due to a
9 year, $24 billion dollar TV deal they signed with ESPN and Turner.
So back to PBC. $500 million a year for 10 years?
NASCAR makes $820 million a year
USGA is making $83 million a year.
NHL is making $200 million a year.
UFC is making $90 million a year.
NBA is making more than $2.5 billion a year.
It’s time to go back to the statement about FOX and its affiliates. Just to put in perspective what PBC means to FS1 at the moment.
September 13th, 2016 was the last day a PBC card aired on a FOX network. This is a company that has paid out lucrative contracts to former ESPN personalities to bolster their original programming and offer a legitimate alternative to the World Wide Leader.
Here are the top 15 programs and their ratings according to Nielsen Media from that day.
1. Premier Boxing Champions — Watts vs Ramirez — 182,000
2. Barcelona vs Celtic — 153,000
3. The Herd — 120,000
4. NASCAR Race Hub — 115,000
5. Undisputed — 82,000
6. Speak For Yourself — 63,000
7. Speak For Yourself — 62,000
8. NFL Films Presents — 49,000
9. MLB Whip Around — 39,000
10. UCL Pregame — 37,000
11. Undisputed — 31,000
12. FSL with Jay and Dan — 30,000
13. TMZ Sports — 17,000
14. MLBs Best — 9,000
15. Scottish Premiership — 8,000
Skip Bayless has been FOX’s latest big acquisition from ESPN and both of the airings of his new show just barely crack past the 100,000 viewer mark if we combine the ratings. Putting this further into perspective, Kevin Watts and Eddie Ramirez are completely unknown entities in the world of boxing and they still stood as the highest rated show on FS1 for the day.
One conclusion to draw is that PBC stands as a worthy investment for FOX in generating consistent ratings. Their original programming is drowning in their efforts to duplicate, match, or best what is happening over in at the ESPN headquarters in Bristol. Live sports seem to be the only real incentive people have to pay any attention to FOX’s dedicated sports channel, and with that FOX are willing to gamble on a brand that has done consistently good ratings on their network and in general for a niche sport.
Back to the money
I think $500 million is off the mark. HBO was rumored to have a $100 million dollar budget a few years ago before their interest in the sport waned. Granted, PBC would be responsible for generating exponentially more content than HBO did in their golden years, but essentially $5 million dollars per card is excessive.
My thinking is that a ballpark figure around $200 million a year would actually work.
“FOX gets 100% advertiser rights/revenue and 50% of venue fee.”
This makes a lot of sense for FOX and is a worthwhile gamble for PBC. If this is a part of the deal, you have to assume FOX is looking at this with an optimistic eye. They see potential for growth and would be willing to pressure PBC into consistently delivering in order to make those advertising spots as lucrative as possible.
Suppose we see the return of Floyd Mayweather for a record breaking 50th win. Given what Mayweather is able to do when charging fans $60 dollars to see him fight, they could charge enough in ad spots to make back their money for the entire year.
From the advertisers point of view (we’ll go with Corona), there is long-term stability in working FOX with an incremental performance structure. Right now as it stands, we’re looking at 2 cards a week with about an average audience of 150,000 viewers. That’s basically a guarantee of 300,000 views of their beer ads on a weekly basis.
Back to the incremental performance structure. Let’s suppose PBC skyrockets and begins averaging a million viewers per card. That’s 2 million guaranteed per week. Now FOX can triple the money they’re getting from Corona. This sort of long-term partnership is mutually beneficial to all parties with guaranteed minimums.
Conclusion
Up until now PBC has taken an approach that has resembled throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. We’ve seen their cards appear on a multitude of networks, at varying times, featuring fighters from all around the world.
Anyone who has watched the startup in the past year would have the same comments. It’s too fragmented. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re throwing money away on things that won’t work.
Could it be that since PBC’s inception, we’ve seen nothing but research and data gathering. Could it be that from the start, PBC wanted to be seen as a viable alternative to the NHL or UFC and not just a general sport that could be dabbled in?
Whatever the case is, if this rumor is correct, it would be a massive step in flipping the narrative on how boxing works. That’s a big ask though. We have to remember that this is a rumor on the internet from someone who hasn’t provided any source or any proof of his claim or statement.
The fact that PBC’s fall schedule is barren right now could be seen as many things. It could be an unwillingness to compete with the NFL and College Football or it could be the calm before the storm of a new deal.
Or it certainly could be that the people who greenlit the PBC experiment have suddenly wised up. They see that the sport is it’s own worst enemy and that ratings have declined over the years have caused even those who’ve been most loyal to the sport to begin allocating money elsewhere.
The truth is everything we’ve known about how boxing has worked has indicated that PBC would not succeed. Boxing has had its chance on network TV and failed. Boxing had its chance on cable and it failed there as well. Boxing has found a consistent home on premium cable that featured fights people cared about on networks that spend most of their time and efforts on creating the kind of personas around fighters to have viewers invested. That’s been present to some extent with PBC, but the effectiveness has been marginal at best.
In fact, not a single star has been created since the inception of the brand. We’ve seen guys convert themselves from prospects to world champions, but nobody has ingratiated themselves with fans the way HBO’s stars have. One look at a pound-for-pound list will prove that point.
And again, this is all the word of some random person on a message board. This could have been someone lying, trolling, attempting to trigger, rustling jimmies, or whatever you want to call it.
But this does seem oddly like what we saw a few summers ago when Golden Boy went quiet on Showtime. When the little remaining fights they had on their schedule featured uncompetitive fights that drew very little interest from the boxing public. Little did anyone know that those fighters got soft touches to ensure they would be set to carry the torch of a new brand of boxing.
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