Canelo-Jacobs / May 4th Las Vegas / WHO WINS (poll)

[Kirkland Laing]

Guys, to make my point more understandable, what if Canelo got a career ending injury in his next fight? Or fails to meet his 11 fight, 5 year, contract? If he has $365 million banked he could never fight again due to all sorts of circumstances, so it's a little more complex than they reveal in press releases.

If I managed Canelo we certainly wouldn't be fighting Jacobs with 9 fights left to honour

This is correct. There's no way that money can be guaranteed in boxing. Promoters are not franchises like the Yankees with 81 guaranteed home games a year and guaranteed TV contracts. It's as guaranteed as Eddie Hearn's billion. If the numbers don't get made then there'll be escape clauses in the contracts. DAZN might not even exist in a couple of years.

Obviously if you can’t honor your contract (by injury for example), then you won’t get paid. I’m also sure that DAZN does have some say in who Canelo fights. I can’t imagine that DAZN made a contract with Canelo allowing him to fight bums.

As titofan pointed out though, if he does honor his contract, meaning that he fights who GBP and DAZN agree upon, I don’t see anything that says that if he keeps on losing that he goes below his minimum contract price. Maybe I’m wrong, but I would have to see where it says that he can make less from losing fights.

So my original point was that losing to Jacobs doesn’t affect his future earnings like it would for other fighters.

He'll have to win as well. Or at least remain an attraction. If he's not selling streaming subscriptions he's not going to get paid. The entire payment thing is predicated on him making DAZN a profit. They're not doing this in order to hand him hundreds of millions of dollars, they're doing it to make money. If the money isn't coming in there'll be endless escape clauses for them to end the deal, same as with Hearn and his billion dollar deal.

Is that in the contract though? Like the amount of losses? Because that is the point of signing a contract. DAZN is hoping to make a huge profit off of Canelo and squeeze him for as much as he’s worth while Canelo is trying to get guaranteed money. Otherwise, what is a contract for if he loses to Jacobs and they just say “sorry, you lost and now we won’t honor your contract?”

A contract is signed and with that comes the risk that the person who signed the contract doesn’t make the money you hoped. Again, if someone can find me the part of the contract that gives DAZN an out of Canelo loses then I’ll believe you. Otherwise, I’ll assume it’s guaranteed.

I can guarantee you it's not guaranteed. NFL players' contracts aren't even guaranteed. And they're contracts with franchises who have guaranteed predictable income streams for years ahead. Baseball players have guaranteed money because of strikes and stoppages over the years. But even then their union had an actual organisation to negotiate with run by a commissioner. Professional boxing is just a bunch of dodgy businessmen who can't agree on anything, never mind forming some kind of umbrella organisation that a nonexistent boxers' union could negotiate with.

At the end of the day pro boxing is a bunch of guys putting their own money up to finance various fights which may or may not result in a profit for the promoter. It in no way resembles any kind of organised league or collective or whatever. Boxing contracts aren't worth the paper they're printed on by and large. The people paying the money have endless escape clauses built into them because they can't guarantee anything for any length of time. A promoter is not like the Red Sox or the Lakers where they have a known fanbase, TV contracts for years ahead, a waiting list for season tickets at their stadiums and so on to the point where they can closely predict their revenue for years to come. Promoters and especially TV/media companies don't have guaranteed revenue streams in the same way, especially at the dawn of the streaming age with pirates able to steal streams and resell them via iptv subscriptions etc. Nobody can predict whether they'll even be there in a couple of years. Even Alvarez who is the closest thing in boxing right now to a sure thing can't be sure he's going to be able to fight again ever. He could fail a brain scan, suffer an career ending injury in training and so on. You'd be crazy to guarantee him hundreds of millions of dollars when his situation is so ephemeral.