WHEN YOUTUBER KSI burst into the ring, receiving applause from the crowd before shouting over the microphone about fighting various other influencers and stopping FaZe Temperrr in what was billed as an exhibition fight Everything just feels pretty boring. Not only is this incredibly predictable and pointless, but it’s also very receptive.
We know what this is: a cash prize for all participants. KSI has no intention of rising through the professional ranks and vying for titles and neither should he, this is just another business venture – like his energy drink business and his music career. him – to continue building his profile and growing his bank account.
In light of a few revelations over the past week, we think DAZN’s engagement with KSI and other YouTubers has a similar motive: take advantage of a very odd gap in the market and exploit it at all costs. its value. To some extent that was true but now it seems DAZN’s commitment to influential boxing has perhaps become a necessity.
Bloomberg reports that DAZN posted an overall loss of £2.3 billion in 2021 and an operating loss of $1.36 billion. DAZN CEO Shay Segev told Bloomberg that the main reason for these losses was that DAZN bought the German and Italian football rights to the Bundesliga and Serie A for $1.9 billion. In the United States, DAZN’s main source of content is professional boxing.
Backed by billionaire Len Blavatnik, DAZN burst onto the boxing scene a few years ago and became one of the sport’s greats. But there’s no denying an expansion of the streaming service in the US wasn’t planned.
Running such high losses would be fatal for the vast majority of businesses. But Blavatnik’s support gives DAZN something of a safety net. Netflix, the world’s largest streaming platform, has struggled to turn a significant profit for years. That comparison can only be made so far because Netflix didn’t have investors like Blavatnik at first, and the company’s real success came after it transformed its business model from offering movies. rental to streaming.
The point is that these losses do not mean that DAZN is dead in the water. They certainly put the business in a difficult position, an unsustainable situation, but DAZN could have entered the sports broadcast market knowing full well that it would lose money for some time before dominate certain markets. The war chest that Blavatnik provides certainly speaks for itself.
We’ve seen changes to DAZN’s approach in just a few years. After launching with a bold anti-PPV message, the broadcaster launched its own PPV platform last year in a conscious effort to cover the loss. And then there’s the most recent development: DAZN’s long-standing commitment to influential boxing.
Last week, it was announced that KSI and his Misfits Boxing outfit signed a five-year contract with DAZN for exclusive broadcast rights. Speaking to 5 Live Boxing about the partnership, DAZN executive vice president Joe Markowski said: “We’ve been in this space since 2019 and I’ve always felt like DAZN gave birth to the right level of authority. He crossed this because we had the first major event in the field. space with Logan Paul against KSI.
“Great. Then we had our first professional game against Jake Paul, in February 2020, I think, at Super Bowl weekend in Miami. And of course, Covid has severely disrupted the sports industry and that’s one of the projects that gave us a bit of a hard time.
“But we always knew we wanted to return to this space in a more meaningful way, and accordingly we have maintained relationships with all the major players. And those relationships have paid off because we’re currently in a five-year relationship with what we think is the most professional operation in this space at Misfits.”
Such long-term contracts are only awarded to the likes of Canelo Alvarez and Anthony Joshua. So it’s no wonder that influential boxing – what Markowski was so optimistic about trying to call “cross boxing” – is now a staple of DAZN’s business plan for at least the next few years.
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The Telegraph recently reported that the WBC intends to introduce separate divisions for transgender boxers. The newspaper spoke to WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman, who said: “In boxing, a man versus a woman is never acceptable, regardless of the gender change.”
First of all, his statement “transgendered” transgender fighters and so immediately raised some red flags. While the Telegraph section deals with the problem – a complex one – it doesn’t include any actual switched voices in it.
In a similar way, one wonders how much the WBC worked with the transgender community in drawing up plans for these new divisions. Patricio Manuel, perhaps the most famous transgender boxer in the world at the moment and the one mentioned in the Telegraph article, condemned the WBC’s plan.
Manuel, who was born a woman but later had sex reassignment surgery and identified as a man, took to social media and said: “Disappointment is an understatement. WBC inherently dehumanizes transgender people by implying that transgender men are not men and transgender women are not women.”
Regardless of your stance on the matter, if transgender athletes are completely out of the conversation it is setting a very dangerous precedent. It’s certainly a positive sign that the WBC is addressing the topic of transgender boxers rather than disavowing these fighters altogether, but it can’t make decisions that ultimately harm transgender fighters. that athlete.
World Boxing Council (WBC) President Mauricio Sulaiman (JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
Boxing on the box
January 21
Chris Eubank Jnr-Liam Smith
Sky Sports Box Office
Coverage starts at 7pm
