It’s fight week, and there hasn’t been a fight week like this one for a long time. People may argue Joshua-Ruiz II was as monumental an event, but they’d be ignoring the facts. A co-promotion by ESPN and Fox has created a bonafide media spectacle with regards to Wilder and Fury’s second bout. There have been XFL commercials, College Bowl interviews, guest spots on The Masked Singer (which Fury seems hilariously suited for) as well as a four part behind the scenes special aired on both networks. Top it all off with the most premium advertisement of all time, a Superbowl ad, and this fight is really harking back to the Mayweather-Pacquiao hype, albeit not as universal.
The big question is whether all this promotion will pay off. The numbers for PPV that have been thrown around range from anywhere between 500,000 and 2 million. There is a problem inherent in those numbers though, and that problem is that PPV is dead.
PPV is the Blockbuster Movies of buying fights. In 2020, where there are so many illegal streaming options, and boxing’s audience just continues to get younger (see Ryan Garcia and the Pauls), the dinosaurs pushing PPV are truly exposing their boomerism.
I did some research into buying the PPV in Canada, and first, it was hard to find! The fourth link on Google takes you to Rogers, which states I need cable to buy it! Who tf has cable anymore?! So my first attempt to buy failed. Guess what you do if you don’t have cable? You better have a PS4 or an Xbox. Although I only know that through word of mouth. There is literally no advertising that you can purchase the PPV on those systems. So what do the millions of people who don’t have cable do? They stream it illegally.
If this PPV fails to crack a million, which I think it will, people will lament about the promotion. They will lament that boxing does not sell anymore. They will lament that cross promoted fights aren’t worth the money. What they won’t recognize is that millions of people will have watched this fight. Two million? Undoubtedly. Five million? Very likely. Ten million? Possibly. The difficult thing about illegal streams is that it is incredibly hard to tell viewership. There are certain things, like twitter trends, or live thread comments that can help predict viewership, but overall, it’s an extremely difficult task.
Are Fury and Wilder mainstream athletes in the United States? No. Odds are if you asked someone on the street to name one of the heavyweights fighting this weekend, I’d take below 50% that they would be able to. However, that doesn’t mean this isn’t a huge fight, and that doesn’t mean that there won’t be millions of people watching. For boxing to truly start to thrive the PPV model needs to be completely re-worked. Why buy a $79.99 PPV when you can get DAZN for $99 for the year? Either the cost of PPV needs to go down, or more streaming services need to be built.
And now the real prediction. Everybody and their mother has my head said Fury decision, but my heart says Wilder KO. I believe the rumours Fury hasn’t had a great camp. I believe the rumours that his head isn’t in the right space. And I believe that people underestimate Deontay Wilder’s boxing IQ. And so for that reason: Wilder KO9.