George Groves v Eubank Jr: Kalle Sauerland on how the World Boxing Super Series can break the sport’s boom and bust model
George Groves fights Chris Eubank Jr in Manchester this weekend in the semi-finals of the World Boxing Super Series. For the tournament’s organisers, the second half of that sentence will soon be enough to ensure the sport’s fans tune in, regardless of the names mentioned in the first.
Groves vs Eubank Jr — a hotly-anticipated super-middleweight prospect between two world champions and British domestic rivals — follows two fight-of-the-year contenders in the semi-finals of the Super Series’ cruiserweight bracket.
So far, the $50m tournament appears to be a potential antidote to problems that have long plagued the sport: fans frustrated by warring promoters failing to match the best prospects, casual viewers bamboozled by the various alphabet titles shared by numerous fighters and, increasingly, the headline-grabbing hyperbole to sell fights that reached its absurd apex when Floyd Mayweather met Conor McGregor last year.
Read more: Mayweather vs McGregor – What did boxing’s bizarre box office smash signal for the future of sport?
“How many people have watched Mayweather-McGregor back? We provide fights you would watch back,” Super Series co-founder and boxing promoter Kalle Sauerland told City A.M.
“I loved the storyline around Mayweather-McGregor. It was good fun and did record numbers. But you can’t do that on a daily basis.
“Boxing is a traditionally spiky business. Whether it’s Mayweather-McGregor, Joshua-Klitschko, Mayweather-Pacquiao; when it spikes, it’s the most lucrative business in the sports industry. Forget the NFL and the Premier League, boxing numbers smash every other sport out of the park on that spike.
“The issue is that the goal is always trying to conquer that spike. What we’re trying to do is maybe not take the highest spike but bottle it and turn it into a regular, tangible product. It’s the Tour de France for cycling, the Champions League for football.”
The winner of Groves vs Eubank Jr will progress to June’s super-middleweight final at London’s O2 Arena, where they will meet either fellow Englishman Callum Smith or German Jurgen Brahmer, who do battle in Nuremberg next weekend.
Winning the tournament sees a fighter claim an unspecified share of a hefty $50m prize pot as well as the Ali Trophy — a golden gong created by Silvio Gazzaniga, the designer of football’s World Cup.
Like the World Cup, the plan is that the Super Series not only pits the best against the best but becomes a brand boxing fans intuitively tune into at each stage of the event: the draw in June, the quarter-finals in September and October, the semi-finals in January and February, and the finals in May and June.
There is plenty of entertainment industry pedigree behind those betting that it will. Comosa AG, the newly-formed company behind the tournament is made up ofTeam Sauerland, Scandinavian TV conglomerate Modern Times Group and Eurovision Song Contest rights holder Highlight Event and Entertainment.
“It’s a very thought-out product designed so that people understand it and grow consumer behaviour towards it,” says Sauerland.
Yet boxing is a hard-nosed business and what is good for the fans is not always what is good for promoters’ bottom lines. Building a tournament that satisfied all of the sport’s stakeholders is what formed much of the organisers’ four years of research and development.
Read more: Could Anthony Joshua be the first billion dollar fighter?
“The project of the tournament is not to take over,” says the German. “It’s to add to the ecosystem. When you add up all the undercards, we’ve worked with over 30 promoters around the world. We’re more or less leasing assets out of their promotional businesses but we’re returning them as better fighters.”
He points to Oleksandr Usyk, the Ukrainian cruiserweight whose performances en route to the final have led some to tip him as a future challenger to British world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua.
“Usyk was a fringe HBO [American pay-per-view] undercard fighter before the tournament,” says Sauerland “Now he’s a hotly contested asset in most of the big television markets. So his promoter is watching his asset grow at a much quicker rate than he would outside the tournament.”
Unfortunately for one of Groves or Eubank Jr, the equation remains very much zero-sum inside the ring on Saturday night.