Khan vs McCloskey moved from Sky PPV to Sky Sports 3

[generalbulldog]

Maybe it is a shit fight, but in that case, why is everyone blaming Team Khan for being greedy? Sky were happy to sell this fight PPV until a few days ago. It is not Khan's fault the undercard fucked up.

So.. this is all Sky's fault for greenlighting a "shit" fight in the first place. All Team Khan have done is take their fight from one PPV station to another.

If he earns more from the Primetime PPV than the £100,000 offer from Sky he wins. Simple as.

The point being is that Khan's team overestimated his star appeal to sell the shit fight. Pac can get away with it in Clottey because he's an all out action star and top p4p. Haye can do it with Harrison because he has a charismatic persona and can call himself HW champ not to mentioned Harrison was an Gold winner at the olympics and is at least somewhat known to the UK public.

Khan doesn't have those things going for him to sell a fight on PPV agaisnt some d list fighter.

GB, why are you trying to act like you understand how the UK public buys PPVs? Khan is a much bigger name over here than Manny Pacquiao. Like it says above, the Pacquiao-Hatton fight did 300,000, in contrast Mayweather-Hatton did 1.3m. To the general UK public, Pacquiao is 'that guy who KO'd Ricky Hatton & trains with Amir Khan'.

Haye-Harrison was big because it traded on Haye being more popular as a HW champ, and the fact there was that animosity. Haye would not do such big numbers against Matt Skelton. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Audley is the most recognized recent British boxing name with the UK public outside of Haye, Khan, Hatton & Calzaghe. Guys like Froch or Ricky Burns just don't register in the same way.

I think Sky have handled this all wrong. The only people who were going to buy this for the whole card were hardcore boxing fans, and let's face it 90% of them will look for a stream or go to a pub as they did for the Haye-Harrison fight. Most who would have paid for the card would have done so for Khan (who is absolutely massive in the Asian community). I think Team Khan generally act like some dickheads & do down a very likeable fighter, but the fact Sky tried to shaft them onto Sky Sports 3 speaks volumes. They really couldn't shift over a replay of the afternoon Premier League game instead so Khan could be on SS1 or 2, which are the channels that most people have?

The fact they first tried to go to ITV tells me they're not as greedy as we're making out & to be fair it would be difficult for a terrestrial channel to suddenly shift about their Saturday night coverage. The major problem with moving to Primetime would be that it doesn't have the same promotional abilities to casual fans that Sky Box Office does. Considering that the Khan-Maidana fight reportedly did as many sales as Hatton-Pacquiao maybe Sky have missed a trick.

You're right I don't know how the UK public buys ppv over there, I'm just getting the info from British boxing fans from other boards that fills people in on how it works. Correct me if I'm wrong but I was told that Primetime or whatever was some small channel that most of the UK doesn't have and that it was a mistake from team Khan switching to it? Because although Khan would be relegated to fighting on SS3 for this McCloskey fight it will still be a much bigger audience because it's Sky compared to PPV Primetime? I was told that if one isn't fighting on the Sky network or terrestrial television then people won't know that you're fighting? You can even be fighting great matchups and on some PPV brand but if it's not Sky, no one cares? Again that's what I've been told.

About Pac, no he's not a big star over in the UK, but in the US he is. He was in matches that boxing fans considered to be bad matches such as Clottey and Margarito, but one did 700k ppv buys and the other 1.15 million buys. What I'm trying to say is that certain guys can manage to do those kind of PPV numbers in bad matchups. Pac is one, Floyd is most definitely the other. I just read that Khan only manage to pull only 50 advance orders of the PPV fighting McCloskey, although that's not the final number but is extremely low. So it seems to me that Khan isn't one of those stars that can manage to get people to order the PPV in bad matchups, but Pac can. That was what I was trying to point out.