In the wake of the Floyd Mayweather Jr-Shane Mosley bout, a glaring negative regarding boxing pay-per-views stands out: the poor quality of the undercard.
For a price ranging from $50 to $65, boxing fans were subject to three undercard bouts that were on the top of no fight fan’s Christmas list of possible encounters. While the card turned out to be decent enough, the question remains why, exactly, do boxing fans always seem to get stuck with one pearl and three slimy, empty oysters when it comes to pay per view events?
MMA-oriented fans tend to be the most vocal in their distaste for this practice. Fans of MMA, and the UFC specifically, are accustomed to pay-per-view events which feature a hyped main event alongside three or four intriguing undercard bouts. The question these fans pose to boxing is: Why can’t you do the same?
One of the major reasons is simple economics. While the UFC has managed to keep finances “in house” and salaries in-check, boxing operates on an open market full of agents, managers and promoters who know the game and know the value of what their clients provide.
Shane Mosley, before factoring in pay-per-view sales incentives, made a base pay of seven million dollars for his losing effort last Saturday; The base fighter payroll for all the fighters combined on UFC 109 was $944,000. And let’s not even mention Floyd Mayweather’s base salary of $22.5 million.
So, with the main event alone costing about as much as 20 UFC cards, it’s easy to understand the fact that loading up the undercard with lesser, but still well-known stars would be economically unfeasible. Unless the boxing public could somehow be sold on $200 pay-per-views.
In an ideal world, Paul Williams vs. Kermit Cintron, which is taking place this Saturday on HBO, would play chief support to Mayweather-Mosley. Neither Williams nor Cintron are superstars, but they are well-known amongst boxing fans and always provide good action fights. But, again, economics play a major role in nixing the thought of an ideal world in boxing. Williams, alone, is making well over the $944,000 combined base of UFC 109.
Even if money were not an issue, boxing would still have to navigate around the fact that there are a number of promoters lurking about, with exclusive contracts in hand, who simply will not cooperate with the idea of making another promoter’s pay-per-view entertaining.
Can you imagine Top Rank’s Bob Arum risking one of his stars on the undercard of a Golden Boy show? You’d be just as likely to find Dana White offering to send BJ Penn to fight on a competitor’s show.
So, in the end, pay-per-view shows stay in-house, with the promoter providing the fighters for the undercard, all the while careful not to give away a gem they can later peddle to HBO, Showtime or directly to the fans via PPV.
The networks also play a role in this.
While the UFC’s only real outlet for its better fights is its PPV shows, boxing bouts get harvested and sometimes even created by the premium channels like HBO and Showtime. You can guarantee that 8 out of 10 quality fights will be snatched up by these networks, with the remaining 2 either too big to keep off pay-per-view or too small to be worth the networks’ attention. Even if Golden Boy/Mayweather Promotions wanted to stack the undercard with quality bouts, there simply wouldn’t be any to choose from. By the time the Mayweather-Mosley undercard was put together, Williams-Cintron, Khan-Malignaggi, Ortiz-Campbell, and Vazquez-Marquez 4 were all signed to be aired on the premium channels.
Most comparisons between boxing and MMA fall apart immediately. They’re simply two different sports employing two very different business models. Whereas boxing is a large wild octopus with unruly tentacles reaching out in all directions, MMA is an adolescent, growing shark swimming circles in a smallish tank.
Companies like the UFC, specifically, keep a close reign on their finances and their fighters; Boxing has long ago expanded beyond anyone’s ability to confine or control. This is good for fighters and most of the behind-the-scenes people, but it often conflicts with the best interest of the fans.
And this leads to maybe the principal reason behind boxing promoters not stacking undercards with fan favorite fights: They don’t have to.
It’s already been well established over and over again that boxing fans are willing to spend premium prices for a quality main event alone. The Mayweather-Mosley card is testament to this fact. The estimated buy rate is expected to be around the 2 million mark and the numbers wouldn’t have likely changed much whether there were 5-star classics on the undercard or not. Boxing fans are accustomed to the situation and don’t even expect much anymore from the PPV prelims. They simply turn to HBO or Showtime or FOX, ESPN, etc for the second and third-tier fights that they want.
So, until boxing fans revolt and stop buying the shows with poor undercard attractions or until there’s some sort of drastic, monumental change in the way fighters and promoters expect to be paid, things aren’t likely to change.
The bad news for MMA fans is that, as the sport grows and begins to expand into the real world of sports finance, necessity will make it much more likely that they adopt the boxing business model than the other way around.
