By Ed Warner
Our sport business columnist on boxing’s Queensberry v Matchroom showdown and the difficulty of sewing a team element into intodividual sports.
Would you pay good money to see boxing promoters Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn square up in the ring? Perhaps last weekend’s evening of bouts between fighters in their respective Queensberry and Matchroom stables in Riyadh whetted your appetite.
Warren’s boxers enjoyed a clean sweep in a five-versus-five event that – this a sport never short of hyperbole – was billed as “unprecedented”. He’d be giving away 28 years to the younger man should they ever choose to get it on themselves. Not sure what a weigh-in would reveal though.
Boxing is one of those sports that is quintessentially individual. It’s an age-old truism that once you’re inside the ropes you are on your own. Stick a team into the ring and you’d have a brawl, or some confected version of tag-team all-in wrestling.
There are team-based contests though. Forces Fight Night, for example, sees the three main services in the armed forces contest 10 bouts. The army retained its Inter Services title in Aldershot back in March. Meanwhile, Oxford and Cambridge have had 115 annual scraps, the Light Blues’ recent win giving them a slender three-victory advantage over the history of this varsity battle.
Sewing a sport for the one into a narrative of the collective is an extremely delicate exercise and can prove an expensive, not to say embarrassing, failure.
Athletics has tried repeatedly with little success. Think Nitro Athletics which sought to launch on the allure of Usain Bolt; a single Athletics World Cup in the London Stadium that hasn’t been seen again since; or the European Team Championships that traces its roots back to 1965 but remains a good idea in search of a winning format. In each case, an inability to fire the imagination (and so involvement) of star athletes has translated to public apathy.
The architects of LIV Golf have woven a team element into its individual competition structure, seduced by the phenomenon that is the Ryder Cup. Not that the future success of the Ryder Cup can be taken for granted. The very existence of LIV has threatened to deprive the two teams of some of their most bankable stars – a reminder that it is the combination of format and player quality that lie at the heart of its appeal.
Golf need only look at tennis’s radical changes to the Davis Cup in 2019. The shift to an end-of-season finals week has yet to demonstrate it can revitalise an international team competition whose popularity had been waning. Too often the media narrative, under both old and new formats, has been about the absence of the best players.
Perhaps the apparent aversion to team dynamics is so ingrained in the nature of the stars in individual sports that collectivisation is doomed to fail. Or at least that one-off successes such as the Ryder Cup are simply too hard to replicate. The potential prize for promoters, though, is such that they will and should keep searching for the solution.
Football has seen a phenomenal growth in fans of individual players, happy to switch allegiance to wherever their chosen global superstar is plying his trade. But the depth of team loyalties is such that the sport can allow Messi-mania or Ronaldo-fever to take hold without feeling unduly threatened.
Reverse the dynamic, and imagine a world in which teams of boxers, athletes, golfers or tennis players commanded visceral, enduring loyalty. Economic power would shift at the margin from the athlete to the team owner who contracts them. In return might come some financial certainty or safety net.
Easy to see why the true superstars might be wary of giving up some share of the pie, but the overall health of a sport – its durability and the rewards for the mass of its professionals – could be enhanced.
Got to get the format spot-on first though. Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn are nothing if not entrepreneurial. Expect Queensberry 10-0 Matchroom to be just the start.
Low blow
Just when you thought you knew who the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world would be through to the Usyk-Fury rematch in December, the IBF looks set to strip Oleksandyr Usyk of its title unless he agrees to fight its mandatory challenger first.
And so boxing lets its supporters down in time-honoured fashion. Cue huffing and puffing, but the sport’s promoters seem not-so-secretly pleased. All the more opportunity for them to market bouts for global titles.
Upper cut
The International Olympic Committee has taken direct control of boxing at Paris 2024, deeming the International Boxing Association still unfit for purpose.
The latest punch in the governance fight is the IBA following World Athletics’ lead and offering cash for medals at the Olympics – matching athletics’ $50,000 for gold, but adding $25,000 for each winner’s coach and the same for their national governing body. Plus cash for other medalists too. Even though the IBA has no role in these Games. Total cost $3.1m.
The IBA has a Russian president. Its CEO is a Brit who previously led Boxing Scotland. Minutes on the association’s website show its March board meeting was held in Sochi.
It will be fascinating to see whether nations who have seceded from the IBA and joined start-up body World Boxing instead are prepared to bank their champions’ Olympic cheques, GB Boxing among them.
Knock out?
It’s 10 months since Victoria pulled the rug. The Commonwealth Games Federation trailed a May announcement of a host for the seemingly friendless 2026 edition of its ‘friendly Games’.
For weeks it has been heavily rumoured that there are three possible hosts talking to the CGF, with Glasgow prepared to sit as back-up option should all else fail. Some tell me that is truly the case, others that the Games are definitely headed back to Scotland in a slimmed-down format.
The longer this uncertainty persists, the poorer the quality of what eventually emerges. Someone, somewhere apply some shock treatment please. Miss one edition of the Games and they could be gone forever. And I only hope the CGF is being radical in overhauling its event as part of this protracted process.
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com
