Member-only story
Inside KSI and Logan Paul’s Fight for Acceptance from Mainstream Boxing
A year ago, boxing promoter Eddie Hearn “couldn’t stand it”. Now he’s promoting YouTube boxing. Here’s the inside story of how it happened
Eddie Hearn is boxing’s gatekeeper. The 40-year-old is the son of legendary British sports promoter Barry Hearn, and the managing director of Matchroom Sport, which has injected major money into boxing, signing the first billion-dollar deal back in May 2018.
A few months after Hearn inked his mega-bucks deal — with live streaming sports service DAZN, to broadcast 16 boxing events across the United States — he was asked about another boxing event making waves: the August 2018 bout between Logan Paul and KSI at Manchester Arena, which was seen by millions both legally and illegally.
“For me I can’t stand it,” Hearn said. “It makes my skin crawl but as a business I think it’s genius.”
Eighteen months later, Hearn is in Los Angeles, standing between KSI and Logan Paul, the promoter of a headline bout taking place this Saturday at the STAPLES Center, news FFWD reported on in September. He’s even shunted aside other priorities for Matchroom and DAZN, according to Liam Chivers, the manager of KSI and the person who sold Hearn on the idea of backing YouTube boxing.
“After saying that in the past as a sort of defensive mechanism to play it down at the time, [Hearn] certainly knew if they were to support the project, he’d get some flak,” Chivers explained in exclusive comments. “But he knew that would happen from the boxing community at first anyway, should they decide they wanted to get involved.”
It still took plenty of work to convince Hearn to come on board, though. “Over a series of meet ups and calls, he came to realize the benefits primarily to DAZN with a potential new subscriber base supplementing their U.S. audience development, outweighed the initial negatives. I just had to ensure we got priority ahead of other plans and investments planned for their network, including signing particular top pro fighters.”
Likewise, getting broadcasters to partner up with the fight proved difficult. “Once all the stream numbers and…
