The Plot Thickens
By Eddie Sanchez
What a week for the boxing world, and not in a positive light. We recently highlighted the current mess the heavyweight division finds itself in and also touched on where Canelo currently stands with DAZN regarding his next fight.
Well bad has now turned to worse, and there is now a standoff between Canelo Alvarez, Golden Boy and DAZN.
What a mess this is!
DAZN has clearly demonstrated that they have some cash flow issues, Golden Boy has not been able to manage their relationship with DAZN or with Canelo and Canelo is a fighter just looking to keep it moving.
In a long-story-short explanation this is how we got to this point:
DAZN signs Canelo to a historic contract worth at least $365 million dollars over eleven fights.
DAZN fails to implement a final-say clause to approve Canelo’s opponents.
DAZN has since been unable to host Canelo-GGG III.
Canelo fought elite competition in Sergey Kovalev and Daniel Jacobs (to the dismay of DAZN).
DAZN has been unwilling to meet the financial demands for Billy Joe Saunders and Callum Smith as potential opponents for Canelo.
DAZN has shown a reluctance to host a Canelo Alvarez fight with the absence of a live gate.
DAZN was unwilling to sign-off on a fight between Canelo and Anvi Yildirim for the vacant WBC SMW belt (although he is a very inexpensive opponent).
Golden Boy has sat by and has done absolutely nothing to support Canelo through any of this.
One of the most frustrating points is that DAZN is being unreasonable with the classification of potential Canelo opponents.
There is a need from DAZN’s end to have him face premium opponents, but their definition of premium is a force of contention for Canelo and Golden Boy as it seems that this argument is being used to get out of approving and meeting the financial demands of the contract they signed with Canelo.
As Dan Rafael has noted, DAZN does not (or has not) classified the following champions as premium opponents: Daniel Jacobs, Sergey Kovalev, Callum Smith and Billy Joe Saunders. These men were or are at the top of their respective division rankings when Canelo fought, or considered them as opponents.
To claim that these men are not premium or elite is a shame and represents further reasoning behind boxing being out of touch.
We would never see the UFC discredit their own champions and for DAZN to disrespect these men in the way they have honestly makes their service as a whole look terrible.
Callum, Billy Joe and Daniel are DAZN exclusive fighters! To blatantly claim that they are not premium fighters is also claiming that DAZN itself is severely lacking star power to convince the paying customer to purchase their subscription platform. If they aren’t worth a damn as a Canelo opponent, then why would the buying public pay to watch these fighters?
GIven the hoops that Canelo had found himself in over the past few months, he requested that Golden Boy look into securing a separate platform for his next fight. While Golden Boy claimed to be looking at alternative options, Canelo was never met with an answer and now this is where we are.
It seems that this situation is going to get ugly very quickly.
“I’m the pound for pound number one in the world. I’m not scared of any opponent in the ring, and I’m not going to let failures of my broadcaster or promoters keep me out of the ring,” Canelo said in a statement on Tuesday. “I filed the lawsuit so I can get back to boxing and give my fans the show they deserve.”
This is a massive blow to the sport of Boxing and to the loyal fans.
In the past, champions such as Mikey Garcia and Andre Ward took extended absences to resolve legal issues with their promoters. If we find ourselves in a situation where Canelo is on the shelf for the foreseeable future, that will cast a major black-eye on the sport and DAZN and Golden Boy will find trouble securing contracts with premium fighters going forward.
UPDATES 9.16.2020
A California federal judge has initially dismissed Canelo’s lawsuit and has given his legal team until the 28th to correct clerical errors.
Given this news, there have been some specific allegations that have been directed towards De la Hoya in the suit.
First, De la Hoya had given final right to approve opponents to both DAZN and Canelo, which explains the consistent confusion between the two parties.
While both parties have been told they have the right from Oscar, according to his suit, “Notably, the Alvarez Contract did not mention that DAZN would have any right to accept or reject any opponents selected by Alvarez.”
Secondly, Alvarez’s original lawsuit notes that De La Hoya personally guaranteed liability for DAZN’s payments to Alvarez.
Paragraph 31 of the suit claims the following:
The Alvarez Contract required Golden Boy to pay Alvarez guaranteed payments totaling $365 million for his next eleven boxing matches ($15 million for the December 2018 bout with Rocky Fielding and $35 million dollars for each of his next ten bouts thereafter), expected to be on or about May 5 and September 16 of the years 2019 to 2023. Pursuant to the Alvarez Contract, Oscar De La Hoya, Golden Boy Promotions’ CEO, personally assumed liability for all guaranteed payments.
The rationale from the Golden Boy side was that this offered them leverage to create a second deal with DAZN to broadcast numerous other Golden Boy cards throughout the calendar year.
If these allegations are true it shows that De la Hoya and Golden Boy negotiated separately to Alvarez and DAZN in bad faith and it will be interesting to see what comes of his promotional organization.
Smelling blood in the water, Showtime Sports President, Stephen Espinoza had this to say:
“We’d love to. We’re proud of the time we spent with Canelo,” Espinoza said to Forbes.
“We did some important fights in his career, and we helped launch him as a PPV attraction in the U.S. We’d love to be in business with him again. We’re obviously going to respect his existing contracts. We’re not going to run afoul of that. If there’s a time when he’s available, we’ll be very aggressive. We have a lot of offer. But the time to pursue that is only after it’s clear he’s contractually able to do so. There haven’t been any conversations. As soon as there’s some clarity, we’d love to have the discussion.”
With less then two weeks until the September 28th deadline, we should get further updates on the situation fairly soon.
