With the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight, Netflix looks to usher boxing toward a post-television future

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Of course the success of Netflix’s debut as a boxing broadcaster, scheduled for Friday, depends on the event’s headliners.

There’s 27-year-old Jake Paul, the YouTube star turned prizefighter with a 10-1 pro record, 26.9 million Instagram followers and a desire to prove his boxing bona fides. And there’s 58-year-old Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight champion. Most of the knockouts on his highlight reel date to the late 1980s, but he brings a brand name, along with the possibility that he might expose Paul as an arrogant fraud.

The streaming service, along with Most Valuable Promotions, the boxing company Paul runs alongside business partner Nakisa Bidarian, have set audacious viewership goals. They think Tyson-Paul can become the most streamed live sports event in history, surpassing the 23 million streams the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City drew on NBC Peacock for their playoff game last February.

For hardcore boxing fans, the co-main event is a high-octane title fight rematch between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano. But in terms of streaming stats, the chief support is a novelty match between Neeraj Goyat and Whindersson Nunes. Goyat is a fringe contender, but he’s from India, home to 1.46 billion people. And Nunes is a comedian who, until now, has only boxed as a hobby. But he’s also from Brazil, where 15.1 million people subscribe to Netflix.

“That was a very strategic decision to put two of the world’s biggest consumers of content against each other,” said Bidarian, the Iranian-born, Canadian-raised co-founder of MVP.

For boxing stakeholders, streaming numbers are overtaking TV ratings and set to join gate revenue and pay-per-view buys as standard metrics of success. While other major sports are edging toward their post-television futures, boxing is already there. Premium cable outlets such as HBO and Showtime are out. Streaming services such as DAZN and Amazon Prime are all in. And now here comes Netflix, which is set to show a boxing card six weeks before it streams its first NFL game. Factor in powerful new investors bankrolling high-profile fights, and it becomes clear that boxing, often written off as a dying sport, is still very much alive.

It’s just changing.

Profoundly.

“Now the marketplace has changed again; it’s all broadband and streaming,” said Bruce Binkow, president of Integrated Sports, which handles business affairs for the Premier Boxing Champions managerial outfit. “Everybody’s kind of elbowing for their place at the table.”

Part of boxing’s appeal to streaming services lies in its lack of a centralized structure. Instead of a league with teams and conferences, boxing has a series of promotional and managerial outfits, each with its own stars, and leeway to make its own broadcast deals.

In baseball, NBC can’t match Fox or ESPN’s offerings because there’s no domestic rival circuit with star power roughly equal to MLB’s. But when Showtime dropped sports programming at the end of 2023, Amazon Prime stepped in as the main distributor for Premier Boxing Champions, the company representing some of the sport’s biggest names, including Gervonta Davis, the power-punching lightweight champion.

In 2018, DAZN, the sports-centric streaming service, signed an eight-year, US$1-billion deal with Matchroom Boxing, the British-based promoters whose recent signings include welterweight star Jaron Ennis, along with lightweight standouts Andy Cruz and Shakur Stevenson.

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Paul’s company, MVP, also has a deal with DAZN, but will bring its Friday event to Netflix.

The upshot for fighters?

Fatter bank accounts.

“Everyone on this undercard is getting paid way more than they normally would,” said Niagara Falls native Lucas Bahdi, who, along with Melinda Watpool, is one of two Canadians on Friday’s card. “They’re getting 10 times, maybe more, the exposure they normally would.”

And the payoff for promoters is direct access to a younger, more digitally savvy audience than boxing typically serves. They say it’s one more factor that makes boxing the ideal sport for the cord-cutting era.

Binkow points out that Amazon Prime, which has deals with the NFL and NHL, was already building infrastructure to carry transactional sports programming – add-on subscriptions, or à la carte event purchases – when it reached its agreement with PBC, which plans to hold up to eight pay-per-view boxing events in 2025. And where traditional rights fees cost distributors money, pay-per-view events bring dollars in. A fight card last June, headlined by Davis’s eighth-round knockout over Frank Martin, drew a reported 350,000 buys, which translates to roughly US$26-million in revenue.

“It’s a tough business, but it’s not a complicated business,” Binkow said. “You need a product that people want to pay for.”

Binkow says adding boxing to existing inventory on platforms such as Amazon Prime streamlines the process of ordering pay per views, because most viewers already have the Prime Video app, with credit card info saved, on their preferred device. Bidarian, meanwhile, says that while team sports look best on big screens, boxing translates well to smart phones.

“It’s the best form of content to consume on a small device. Much easier to consume than football or basketball or MLB,” said Bidarian, who served as the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s chief financial officer before partnering with Paul. “Boxing has been reinvigorated in many ways.”

But if streaming services are the rising tide that lifts all boxing boats, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has hit the sport like a storm surge. Its involvement in boxing mirrors the approach the fund employed to lure PGA stars to LIV Golf, and to bring soccer icon Cristiano Ronaldo to Al Nassr FC: offer more money than most people can refuse. In the context of boxing, the PIF is less a promoter than a deep-pocketed sponsor whose ad dollars enable promoters to spend lavishly on matchups.

Heavyweights Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk are a case in point. The pair split a reported US$150-million purse for their title fight, which took place last May in Riyadh, the latest in a series of high-profile, high-cost fight cards in Saudi Arabia since 2022. Two more events, including an Usyk-Fury rematch, are scheduled there before the end of this year.

“We have a strategic vision where we have identified untapped opportunities and are committed to market improvement,” Turki Alalshikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, said in an interview with ESPN last May.

In June, the New York Times reported on the PIF’s plans to bring the world’s top boxers into a single league, similar to the Ultimate Fighting Championship. But that project would require buy-in from established promoters, who all have existing contracts with athletes and broadcasters.

“They’re making the sport grow,” said Dmitriy Salita, a retired fighter, and the head of the promotional company Big Time Boxing USA. “Certainly with the Saudi influence there’s a trickle-down effect financially, because there’s something to look forward to.”

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Saudi officials offer a benign explanation of the government’s interest in pro sports – it is an element of Saudi Vision 2030, an ongoing campaign to diversify the petroleum-rich country’s economy, and modernize its image. Critics characterize it as a sports-washing campaign, aimed at laundering the country’s reputation in light of its human-rights record. In 2023 the Fraser Institute, a Canadian conservative think tank, ranked Saudi Arabia 157th out of 165 countries in its Human Freedom Index.

But in the boxing world, Saudi sponsorship money has jolted promoters out of old habits, prompting rival companies to collaborate in ways that seemed unthinkable five years ago. A Saudi-backed card in Los Angeles last August featured Terence Crawford, a promotional free agent, in the main event, but also included athletes from PBC, Matchroom and Top Rank on the undercard.

Similarly, the Tyson-Paul undercard will employ PBC and Top Rank fighters alongside MVP athletes. Bidarian says promoters are still competitors, but are increasingly open to lending out talent – for the right opportunity.

“Our relationship with everyone is open to figuring out what makes sense for the fighters,” he said. “Boxing is in a place where we need these fights for it to continue to thrive.”