KSI vs Swarmz: What Are The Key Takeaways From Saturday Night’s Action?
In the months preceding Saturday night at The O2, people were quick to criticise the new partnership between Misfits Boxing and DAZN, which gave us the card featuring KSI vs Swarmz. Some of the more extreme \’hardcore boxing fans\’ love to complain about anything different, but the more open-minded of us that watched or even attended the event realised that the impacts were mostly beneficial and influencer boxing is good for building the fanbase of the sweet science, even though what these celebrities do could not be any further away from that.
The Positive Impacts Of KSI vs Swarmz For Boxing
This year alone I\’ve personally been to nine different boxing events in London split between the top four biggest promoters in the UK and I\’ve yet to attend a sold-out show or an event with more than five thousand people in attendance. KSI vs Swarmz was sold-out and had over 18,000 fans at The O2.
All 9 shows I\’ve been to added together, the tickets sold equals around 18,000. The last time the O2 sold out for a boxing event was almost four years to the day in Vasyl Lomachenko vs Luke Campbell. Boxing NEEDS to be able to keep a percentage of the live crowd for it to grow as a sport in the UK. The demographic of the live audience last night was obviously younger and surprisingly more ethnically diverse than a typical boxing show.
KSI Logan Paul 1 amassed 1.2m Pay-Per-View (PPV) buys globally on YouTube PPV, KSI vs Swarmz was PPV in only four key territories and on regular DAZN in 190 countries. DAZN no doubt picked up hundreds of thousands of subscribers/PPV purchases globally for this fight. They now need to be able to retain that audience and attempt to make them boxing fans.
There were significant amounts of advertisement for fights like Eubank Jr Benn and Canelo GGG 3 coming up on DAZN with Chris Eubank Jr even being on the live broadcast. However, boxing has likely once again shot itself in the foot by putting both of its biggest events coming up behind an additional paywall in the United Kingdom.
Fans of influencer boxing have a reason to stay subscribed to DAZN as they will be putting on another event on October 15 in Sheffield featuring Hasim Rahman Jr vs Vitor Belfort and Jay Swingler vs Cherdleys. Misfits Boxing plan to put on six crossover shows a year on the DAZN platform which gives fans of influencer boxing plenty of opportunities to be exposed to championship fights taking place on the channel, with recognisable names such as Ryan Garcia.
DAZN, as a platform, had millions of engagements across multiple social media sites. These new fans will now be shown other posts from DAZN and find boxing naturally appears on their feed. Should they be the right clips such as a brutal knockout, it brings these people one step closer to engaging with real professional boxing.