Boxing is moving a bit to fast right now. With many investors jumping on the bandwagon that boxing is the next big sport about to take of, a huge bubble is being created.
The combination of the DAZN investments and PBC promising boxers like Deontay Wilder the world will be short lived.
Boxing is going to have to take a step back before it keeps moving forward at a more moderate pace. All the marketing in the world can’t sell mismatches. You can fool the fans a few times, but not forever.
The novice boxing fans are the ones right now that are being scared away permanently from the sport as promoters and networks look to make a quick buck.
Once a novice boxing fan watches a couple of highly advertised fights and sees that the quality of the matches are garbage, those are the type of fans that normally will not come back.
Hopefully some of these televised main events that are happening across the major networks will start being set in small cozy arenas, instead of 20,000 seat arena’s and having 50% of it empty.
Don’t Let Your Eyes Fool You:
Just because an arena is full of people watching an event doesn’t make it a success. I have been part of events that over 90% of tickets were comp in order to make the event look good.
There are multiple reasons for giving away flocks of free tickets to events.
1. Casino event is not a big seller, so casino comps tickets to anyone with a loyal club card.
2. Pressure from advertisers: When an event or sports team is selling the promotion to advertisers and sponsors – the cost to advertisers is often based on the number of fans forecasted to be there. For example, if a hockey team is saying we average 10,000 fans a night and there is only 1,000 tickets sold, they will give away as many free tickets to make the event look full so the sponsors don’t feel foolish. There are many ways to give tickets away and make it appear that they weren’t free.
3. Ticket price fluctuation, if the event was set at $100 a seat and doesn’t sell, you can see tickets on the Secondary market for a fraction of the price. This type of selling is meant to make people think that fans are selling the tickets but more often than not in reality the promoters of the event are desperate to get rid of the tickets. This is done in order not to upset the fan paying full price.
4. Another terrific option is closing of the up bowl/ deck and having everyone sit on the first level. Sometimes this is planned in advance and sometimes it’s a last minute decision. There is also the $2 ticket trick that we can talk about on a different day as well.
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