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Terence Crawford-Errol Spence Jr.: Investor Drama
It still doesn’t make sense, but now we have a better understanding of why.
Terence Crawford revealed Tuesday night on Instagram Live that representatives from two unnamed hedge funds offered to pay him and Errol Spence Jr. guaranteed purses of $25 million apiece to finalize their long-awaited fight.
After Premier Boxing Champions founder Al Haymon reportedly informed Crawford that he wouldn’t consider working with these unidentified investors, “Bud” struck a deal to defend his WBO 147-pound crown against Russia’s David Avanesyan (29-3-1, 17 KOs) on December 10 in Omaha, Nebraska, on BLK Prime Pay-Per-View ($39.95).
“We’re going on and on,” Crawford said, “you know? And of course, me and Al, you know, we’re going back and forth, back and forth about, you know, the numbers. We not going back and forth about anything else. We just going back and forth about the numbers. On and on, I have two companies, you know, that reach out to me that, you know, wanted to give me and Spence $25 million guaranteed – $25 million guaranteed, upfront. So, a real guy like myself, I called Spence. ‘Hey, bro, look, listen, you know what I mean? I got this company that’s willing to give us $25 million apiece guaranteed. What’s up? What you gonna do?’ He like, ‘Twenty-five million? What about the back end?’
“I’m like, ‘Dude, listen, if they make they money back then we get [an] 80-20 [percentage on the back end]. You know what I mean? It’s simple math.’ I said, ‘Man, we got people who are buying the fight, I mean, stealing the fight. They got the firesticks.’ And he laughed. He like, ‘Man, I got a firestick, too.’ I’m like, ‘See.’ I’m like, ‘Man, ain’t nobody really like buying, you know what I mean, pay-per-views no more.’ I said, ‘Man, we get this up-front money and we good. It’s a no-brainer. You know what I mean?’”
I’m pretty sure if anything I said was a lie @ErrolSpenceJr would of been said something by now he was watching my live but he knows what’s real but there’s things he might not know or knew because he’s not the one at the table like me myself is.
— Terence Crawford (@terencecrawford) November 2, 2022
Let’s cut to the chase. Please give me the names of these hedge funds and who was behind this offer. We, at NYFights, cordially invite them to an interview to get their side of the story — should they be interested. My door is open. Are we talking about a multitude of Fortune 500 companies or some Cash App Ponzi schemes? These details are critical if Crawford is serious about transparency. On that same thought, if Crawford’s ad-libbing of Spence is accurate, it would seem the unbeaten unified welterweight champion was asking for clarity. Crawford didn’t appear to offer much transparency of his own. Who are these people?
‘Dude, listen, if they make they money back then we get [an] 80-20 [percentage on the back end].’ Who is they? Is Daniel Kinahan involved in the hedge fund? It wouldn’t be the craziest thing, would it? This is boxing after all. And why choose this fight specifically to invest $50 million?
‼️ Terence Crawford speaks out to give his side of why the Errol Spence fight didn’t happen and says he was getting “f***ed” in the deal…
[🎥 @TerenceCrawford] pic.twitter.com/SItPE3j6Km
— Michael Benson (@MichaelBensonn) November 2, 2022
Efforts to consummate a deal for Spence-Crawford were problematic from the onset because both fighters are not popular enough to warrant massive guarantees. This has nothing to do with their skill; that’s an entirely different subject. No one is arguing that Spence (28-0, 22 KOs), a three-belt unified welterweight champion, and Crawford (38-0, 29 KOs), a three-division world titleholder, are not elite pound-for-pound talents. Spence averages roughly 325,000 pay-per-view buys, and Crawford checks in at around 113,000. That’s the simple math. One fighter is the clear A-side, but these numbers do not scream $50 million, and it just doesn’t sound plausible.
If these hedge fund ghosts were genuinely interested in making this fight happen, wouldn’t they have reached out to, you know, the team in charge of the negotiations and in possession of three of the four welterweight titles? That would be team Spence. Sorry, but reaching out to Crawford accomplishes the equivalent of the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series. Nothing.
Can you think of another long-awaited fight worth a hedge fund or two dropping between $140-$150 million with a guaranteed return on their investment? Anthony Joshua vs. Deontay Wilder is a no-brainer. Why go for the smaller fight when you could go for the filet mignon, the prime rib, and the lobster all in one sitting?
Now that brings us back to BLK Prime. As previously reported exclusively by NYFights nearly two weeks ago, the company was founded in 2019, has 25 employees, and has an average annual revenue of approximately $5 million. This information came courtesy of ZoomInfo, a cloud-based platform that provides sellers and marketers with intelligence to help find new customers. We initially delved into star votes for BLK Prime, beIN Sports, DAZN, and ESPN. Admittedly, downloads would have been a better sample size. As of Wednesday morning, BLK Prime has around 5,000 downloads, a far cry from DAZN/beIN Sports, which comes in at approximately 10 million, and ESPN’s 50 million.
According to ESPN, Crawford is set to make an eight-figure sum, in excess of $10 million. We’re told this number could potentially be around $5 million. But needless to say, we’re nearly a month away from the fight with no tickets on sale. To potentially break even on Crawford-Avanesyan, BLK Prime will have to find a way to increase its downloads by some 4,900 percent. And with virtually no promotion, it seems very unlikely they will even sniff a surplus from this experiment.
BLK Prime has an excellent opportunity to promote this fight on social media. It’s too bad they aren’t utilizing the tools at their disposal. Their Twitter page has been inactive for nearly nine months, reminiscent of Crawford’s recent string of inactivity. Furthermore, they went as far as to misspell their main event fighter on a recently shuttered pay-per-view card.
Brian (spelled BRAIN on the BLK Prime website) Norman Jr. (22-0, 19 KOs) was initially slated to headline a BLK Prime Pay-Per-View show titled “Bang Time” on November 12. The event has since been removed from their site, and it was previously reported that the card was pushed back four times before being canceled altogether. This doesn’t sound like a sound investment portfolio.
You would think after the Teofimo Lopez-George Kambosos circus with Triller, people would have learned. Some random entity with hardly any subscribers suddenly has the cash flow to stage a fight that virtually no one wants to watch on an unknown app with a sizeable guarantee. And now we have secret investors wanting to waddle their way into the mix.
Disaster.
