Matchroom Sport's Eddie Hearn Is Opening the Door for Brands to Reach Niche Audiences

He set up boxing’s upset of the year in 2022 when he let Canelo Alvarez go up a weight class and lose to Dimitry Bivol. He teamed with Jake Paul and WWE to pack Madison Square Garden for the fight of the year between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano. Those events—and the pro wrestling/mixed-martial arts promoter swagger Eddie Hearn elicits in front of the cameras—landed Hearn’s Matchroom Sport a three-year extension of the eight-year, $1 billion deal it signed with sports streaming platform DAZN in 2018. But that doesn’t make it a boxing company. “From a noise point of view, boxing is 90%—arguments and so much activity in the digital space,” he said. “But from an actual revenue point of view, it probably makes up around 40% of our business.” Founded in 1982 by Hearn’s father Barry in a billiard hall in Romford, England, Matchroom began as a management team for snooker players before eventually expanding into snooker tournaments, boxing promotion and nine-ball pool tournaments. Its empire now includes golf, table tennis, fishing and darts, which Hearn called Matchroom’s “sleeping giant.” Women’s Boxing Tags In WWE to Punch Up Interest Ahead of DAZN Bout With darts fans filling arenas around the world—and, this year, Madison Square Garden’s Hulu Theater for the bet365 U.S. Darts Masters—the sport accounts for roughly 30% of Matchroom’s revenue, with snooker following at 20% and the blend of other sports making up the other 10%. For brand partners, Matchroom taps into niche fanbases and creates a pipeline to export that passion one sport at a time. With more than 120 employees, Matchroom is looking to expand its presence in the U.S. and around the world by pairing popular athletes with their home markets and creating a raucous atmosphere that translates to streaming viewers and revenue. “Darts is definitely a slow burner in America,” Hearn said. “But it only takes a few events like that for people to tune in, watch and go, ‘Wow.’” Punching into the U.S. market When Matchroom hosted professional bowling’s Weber Cup, it held just one event in the United States—in Las Vegas in 2019. For nine-ball pool, it alternated sites between the U.K. and Las Vegas for the Mosconi Cup before putting a full tour in place six months ago. When Matchroom wants to make a statement in the U.S. market, it turns to boxing. While promoting fights in the U.K., Hearn made a point of inflating his own personal brand within boxing and serving as a loquacious figurehead for his company. He found perfect templates in the U.S. “I looked at [UFC founder] Dana White, I looked at [WWE founder] Vince McMahon,” he said “I looked at all these key spokesmen and thought, ‘I need to develop myself’ and not just be talent lead—I need my own voice, my own platform. And that worked very well with us in the U.K.” Top Rank Is Fighting for a 24/7 Boxing Market When he expanded Matchroom’s boxing promotions to the U.S., it took him a while to understand the market, the fans and the vast differences from state to state. After signing Alvarez to a multi-fight deal in 2022 (which Alvarez just ended after a Matchroom bout against Gennady Golovkin in September), Matchroom tapped into a passionate Hispanic fanbase in the U.S. that gravitated toward Hearn through Alvarez. That made Hearn think differently about the location of Matchroom’s U.S. fights. While Madison Square Garden remains a favorite, he’s just as likely to host a bout in New Orleans, San Antonio, Phoenix or San Diego if he believes that’s where the best crowds will be. It’s also made him think in grander terms about who he’s putting into the ring. Turning brands into fans Hearn received criticism after Alvarez went up a weight class to fight Bivol in Las Vegas and lost. Hearn heard it again when Taylor jumped up a class from lightweight to junior welterweight, drew a hometown crowd in Dublin and lost to champion Chantelle Cameron earlier this year. His penchant toward making the biggest fights possible earned him his deal with DAZN, but skepticism from promoters and hardcore fans for putting fighters in a position where they can lose. “We're not interested in working with fighters that don't want to test themselves,” he said. “We don't make our money from an empty arena with poor viewership. We make our money from a sold-out Madison Square Garden and 100,000 Pay Per View buys, so I'm consistently challenging our fighters to make sure that they do test themselves.” Last year's bout between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano was ESPN's fight of 2022. But Hearn said the Alvarez-Bivol bout made Matchroom closer with brands including Hennessy, DraftKings and Bud Light in the U.S.—when its U.K. partnerships were once dominated by online betting concerns. Taylor-Serrano, meanwhile, became a personal challenge for Hearn after he heard it repeatedly called “a bad idea." After putting Matchroom, MSG and DAZN’s weight behind Taylor and having Paul back Serrano, brands followed. “Media outlets were just welcoming the story on the platforms that wouldn't give us the kind of access that they did—national breakfast shows with both girls in the studio,” Hearn said. “It just got bigger and bigger as it went, and then it just culminated in fight week and WWE. … Brands just wanted to be associated with it.” The next national pastime The U.S. Darts Masters drew 5,600 people per night to MSG’s Hulu Theater at the beginning of June. That’s a fraction of what Matchroom’s Taylor-Serrano bout drew in the big arena in the same building, but those are still bigger crowds than nearly 100 of the nation’s 120 minor-league baseball teams drew on average last year. The world’s best professional darts players make millions of dollars per year and walk out in front of 10,000 to 15,000 fans each week in arenas around the world. English, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch and Belgian players are celebrities in the PDC. In Poland, however, Matchroom sold 13,000 tickets to a darts event in one day without one Polish darts player in its Professional Darts Corporation lineup. For Hearn, darts matches deliver viewership twice as large as that of boxing and sell out events long before fans know which players will appear. “If you buy a ticket for a fight, you're coming to watch Canelo against Golovkin—you're not turning up on the night and wondering who's playing,” Hearn said. “[Darts is] more about the atmosphere in the arena—it's the feel-good factor, it’s value for money—and it's just become a phenomenon.” New York got to know Michael van Gerwen after his win over Jeff Smith at the U.S. Darts Masters. Hearn’s time in U.S. arenas for boxing leads him to believe that U.S. fans will eventually grow to love darts for both its cacophonous live experience and robust drinking culture. Unlike boxing, however, Matchroom owns the PDC and controls player academies, rankings, broadcasts developmental tours and international schedules. It takes a similar approach with its snooker and nine-ball pool leagues. So when it considers a documentary series for boxing, as it has with DAZN, it makes similar plans with a much freer hand for its darts league. Following the example set by Netflix’s successful Formula 1 franchise Drive to Survive, Hearn said he eventually wants to show working-class darts players as they move from jobs at building sites to $5 million gigs throwing darts around the globe. UFC Weaponizes Fonts and Color Palettes Into a Potent One-Two Punch “The expansion hasn't just been a bit of luck,” Hearn said. “We've been doing significant broadcast deals in certain regions where we've seen viewership through the roof, and then we've been entering that market shortly after.” The U.S. Darts Masters were broadcast live on DAZN, and the Mosconi Cup pool event will find a home on DAZN in December. Through Matchroom’s 10 to 12 North American boxing events each year, it’s built both the equity and brand following to open doors for its other sports here and broaden its reach even further. Looking to the UFC for inspiration, Hearn said he’s tried to not only make the big events fans want to see, but use the strength of those popular events—whether it's boxing in the U.S., snooker in China or darts in the Netherlands—to introduce viewers to their new favorite sports. Any sport can rise from obscurity to superstardom, he said, if it's willing to relinquish some control and rebuild up to current code. “It needs to be built, rebuilt at the root rather than coming in and just nipping the flowers at the top, the petals, and trying to see if we can do something pretty up there,” Hearn said.