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Small crowds generate key revenue for boxing

Errol Spence Jr. will be back in front of fans in AT&T Stadium to fight Danny Garcia.getty images

The first four months of boxing’s return was staged largely without stars, whose contracts often require payouts that exceed the revenue a promoter can generate without ticket sales.

 

They have begun to trickle back of late, with Top Rank booking Terence Crawford and Vasiliy Lomachenko at the MGM Bubble, airing on ESPN.

But promoters also have begun to return to large venues that allow for widely dispersed crowds, such as the Alamodome, where Premier Boxing Champions held a Showtime pay-per-view card last month and at AT&T Stadium, where Errol Spence Jr. will face Danny Garcia on a Fox Sports PBC PPV on Dec. 5.

Spence, who was raised outside Dallas, is on pace to sell out the scaled-down venue, which is selling tickets in pods, accommodating about 21,000 spread throughout all levels of the 80,000-seat stadium, with about 1,600 on the floor, 16,000 in the seating bowl and as many as 3,000 in the suites.

With prices ranging from $40 to $2,500, that likely would generate a gate approaching $4 million, with PBC-affiliated promoter Tom Brown netting as much as $3 million from ticket sales. While the $75-$85 pay-per-view will net four times that much if it reaches industry projections of about 300,000, the addition of ticket revenue from AT&T Stadium would go a long way toward making the show lucrative for the headline fighters and profitable for the promoter and the venue.

“If you can add in a decent gate while having to deal with reduced capacity due to the pandemic, it really helps the economics,” said Bruce Binkow, a consultant who works with PBC. “It’s not impossible to conceive of the fact that you would sell enough pay-per-views that you would pay for the expenses and the purses. But this can augment the revenue in a way that’s material.”

Placing a fight spread out in a large venue under pandemic protocols increases expenses.

 “Are these events as profitable for us as they are in normal times? Absolutely not,” said Dallas Cowboys Executive Vice President Chad Estis. “But we’re also not doing them to lose money.”

The impact of the pandemic on a PPV featuring an established U.S. attraction remains to be seen. Since August, Fox has aired 10 PBC cards, with half on its flagship. At an average 1.1 million, audiences are down from a year ago. But the PPV is getting hefty promotional exposure during Fox NFL, college football and college basketball broadcasts.

“There are definitely challenges, but the show must go on,” said Bill Wanger, Fox Sports executive vice president and head of programming and scheduling. “This is a fight everyone is looking forward to. Just like all the other sports, you gotta figure out a way to get back out in front of consumers.” 

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