His December 15th fight with Rocky Fielding will be the 1st of a multi-fight deal.
Huge news is breaking across the boxing-sphere. Pound for pound elite unified middleweight champion and the sport’s top draw Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (50-1-2, 34 KOs) has reportedly signed a “multi-fight” deal with recently launched streaming service DAZN as per several of the sport’s top journalists. The streaming service has secured his US broadcast rights. The implications here are huge.
For one, we now know who is broadcasting his super middleweight experiment against Rocky Fielding on December 15th. That fight alongside the rest of Canelo’s future fights and the entire Golden Boy roster has been up in the air since HBO announced that 2018 would be its last year in the fight game. That is the immediate implication, but there are several more to consider.
DAZN has made it a point to say time and time against that their $9.99/mo price point is all-encompassing. They will not be doing PPVs. Given that Canelo’s last fight came at $84.99 for his rematch with Gennady Golovkin and only came with a few undercard bouts, this is certainly quite the savings for US fight fans. Not only is it less money a year than two Canelo PPVs were likely to run at this point, but DAZN is loaded with content from the World Boxing Super Series and Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing. With three belt heavyweight titleholder Anthony Joshua on board already as well, DAZN will now be broadcasting the two biggest stars in the sport by a good margin.
Third and last, this probably means the entire Golden Boy roster is going to end up on DAZN. Golden Boy head Oscar De La Hoya has been open and clear about the fact that he is going to be looking not just for a home for Canelo, but for his entire roster. That only makes sense too. Without the redheaded Mexican star, the Golden Boy stables don’t have huge value these days. Sure, De La Hoya promotes many good fighters and promising prospects from Jorge Linares and Rey Vargas to Diego De La Hoya and Ryan Garcia, but they lack another real draw to do big numbers. Canelo is almost the entirety of Golden Boy’s worth. To shop the rest of the roster without him seems like a fool’s errand. Details remain scant, but I would be shocked if DAZN wasn’t the home of Golden Boy Promotions going forward.
There is more to come on this too, I’m sure, but this is huge enough news as it is.
UPDATE: The latest is the confirmation that DAZN will host “other Golden Boy cards” as per boxingscene.com, but that’s it so far.
