The new boxing promotion, headed up by the UFC’s owners at TKO Group Holdings, has ambitious plans for the future with the first card set to launch in September when Canelo Alvarez takes on Terence Crawford in a superfight taking place in Las Vegas.
UFC CEO Dana White has already been announced as the promoter for the event with WWE president Nick Khan also involved in the newly formed boxing league, which is financially backed by Saudi Arabia and Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority in the country. While some details have been revealed since the boxing promotion was first announced, the new league has ambitious plans when it comes to the full schedule that kicks off with the card on Sept. 12.
“I would just tell you that we’re expecting with the boxing organization that we’re putting on an average of call it 12 fights a year, 12 cards a year for each of the next five years,” TKO president and chief operating officer Mark Shapiro said during a quarterly financial call with investors. “Still putting that plan together and obviously working hand in hand with our friends from Saudi.”
In addition to the 12 cards on average per year, the new Saudi-backed boxing league is also plotting several “superfight” events similar to the one with Canelo vs. Crawford in September.
“Irrespective of those, we will look to do anywhere from one to four sort of superfights per year, we’ll see how that plays out,” Shapiro said. “But obviously we would term the Canelo/Crawford September matchup as one of those. And then on that undercard, we would have a number of those undercard fights that would likely air on the television partner/media partner we would have for our newly formed boxing organizations.”
As of now, the new TKO boxing league doesn’t have a broadcast partner but those details will likely get sorted out ahead of the actual launch in September.
While TKO is running the show, Shapiro was quick to point out again that the company is actually assuming no financial liability for the boxing promotion with Saudi Arabia providing all of the funding.
Add to that, the 12 individual fight cards are also going to be kept separate from the “superfights” that could potentially involve some of the biggest names in the sport.
“Those are two separate businesses,” Shapiro revealed. “The Saudis are funding what would be these superfight cards. We’ll work with them on media rights deals and take a commission. We’ll work with them obviously on global partnerships. We’ll work with them on ticketing. We’ll handle the production.
“We’ll look to potentially promote all of them with Dana White and Nick Khan driving much of that but then separately, we’ll have our boxing organization, our [promotion] with them where we’re going out and doing as I mentioned 12 cards a year on average and getting a separate media rights fee, selling global partnerships to those cards and of course promoting and producing those cards on whatever media platform we choose to tie with. That’s the state of boxing.”
Thus far, the new promotion has only been referenced as TKO Boxing but Shapiro promises that’s not actually going to be the name used once the promotion officially launches later this year. He didn’t provide any insight on the new name but promised that’s already in the works.
“I should mention it’s not going to be called TKO boxing,” Shapiro said. “That seems like the soup of the day. We’ll be unveiling our name for our business fairly soon here. But it will not be TKO boxing.”
