IN this week’s Boxing News we put your questions to Matchroom Boxing boss Eddie Hearn over six gripping pages, and his answers include this justification for their pay-per-view events.
What merits a pay-per-view (PPV) fight, because the ones you [Matchroom] put on are incredibly random?
Stuart Massie, Facebook
I think the great debate about PPV is so overhyped. We are now in October and there have been two PPVs [on Sky Sports Box Office] this year. One was Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao in May, and the other was our May 30 card where if you’re telling me you didn’t get value for money that night, well, quite frankly, I don’t believe you. Every now and again we get a chance to put a show on and create fights that cannot be made without PPV.
When you look at the May 30 card there is no way I could ever have brought Jorge Linares over to fight Kevin Mitchell on a normal Saturday night Fight Night. There is no way
I could have brought Evengy Gradovich over to fight Lee Selby, so add those to Anthony Joshua-Kevin Johnson, and Kell Brook-Frankie Gavin and, for me, that is 100 per cent a PPV card. But in answer to what is a PPV fight? The numbers will tell you. The Tony Bellew-Nathan Cleverly rematch [November 2014] did more buys than Carl Froch-Mikkel Kessler II
[May 2013], but it also had on the card [James] DeGale, [Scott] Quigg, Joshua. All I know is, that the fights I’ve put on PPV, I could not, in a million years, put all those fights on a normal Saturday Fight Night.
TO READ THE FULL INTERVIEW, INCLUDING HEARN’S VIEWS ON BOXNATION, AL HAYMON AND KELL BROOK’S OPPONENTS, DOWNLOAD THE LATEST EDITION OF BOXING NEWS MAGAZINE HERE
