As one of the world’s most mature media landscapes, navigating the UK sports market can be tricky for sports rightsholders in most cases. For rightsholders that have to manage three different sports properties at once, keeping an eye on the international rights market for each as it does so, then that difficulty naturally compounds.
That is the struggle of Matchroom Sport, the iconic UK-based promoter that juggles a portfolio that spans boxing, snooker, and darts in both its home market and globally.
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The promotion was established by Barry Hearn in 1982, starting in snooker talent management before quickly expanding into boxing promotion, and eventually into darts. Now, the business, run by Barry’s son Eddie Hearn, holds the majority stakes in both the World Snooker Tour (WST) and Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) properties, cementing control over the elite-level competitions of both sports, as well as a boxing empire that ranks among the most prominent in the world.
Despite the many hats the company has to wear, the business has thrived in recent years. Across the 2024 financial year, Matchroom Sport posted a total group profit of £39.4 million ($53.05 million), up almost £6 million on the year prior, on revenue of £218.2 million.
Of Matchroom’s core properties, its boxing arm made a post-tax profit of £11.4 million, despite revenue dropping from £100.9 million in 2023 to £77.6 million in 2024, although that comes down to the promoter booking seven fewer shows in 2024 than a year prior, reducing revenue but also lowering costs. The PDC performed even better still, drawing a profit of £13.5 million on £54.2 million of turnover, while the World Snooker commercial subsidiary that manages the WST also racked up a six-figure post-tax profit.
The common theme across the three, Matchroom states in its filings, is that there is no common theme. The filings state that Matchroom’s directors “do not consider there to be a single key performance indicator” but rather have chosen to examine the performance of each property on an event-by-event basis.
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By GlobalData“We’re a nimble business,” explains Frank Smith, the chief executive of Matchroom Boxing. This approach speaks to the flexibility that Matchroom conducts itself with, not just financially but across all facets of its operations.
Smith calls in from a rainy London café, between bouts of intense travelling. Like most of Matchroom’s executive suite, Smith ventures worldwide with the various promotional arms of the company. After making the short journey to Belfast for Matchroom’s September 13 Lewis Crocker vs Paddy Donovan bout at the city’s Windsor Park stadium, Smith then ventured across the planet to Nagoya, Japan, to support Matchroom’s Murodjon Akhmadaliev in his title shot against pound-for-pound star Naoya Inoue.
As the global chief executive of Matchroom Boxing, Smith fills a role that is far removed from his introduction to the company in 2008, when he joined as a 14-year-old doing work experience, but that “nimble” mentality has persisted throughout the growth of the company, which turned over £13.9 million in revenue that year, despite a 1469.78% increase in the company’s annual revenue over that period.
“You have to evolve,” he explains. “It's quite easy to sit there with a great product that's making a lot of money and go ‘Oh, this is easy’ and just keep doing the same thing. But we're in a business with huge investment and huge competition, so you can't just sit still.”
At its core, Smith posits, this is enabled by the fact that Matchroom remains a family business, run not just by the Hearn father and son duo, but by a “small core team who make quick decisions, and make things happen.”
Reacting to a changing world
This tactic applies universally, not just to targeting brands for commercial partnerships, but also reacting to shocks and sea changes in the industry. The broadcast landscape, as mentioned earlier, is constantly changing one way or another. But being nimble does not mean being condemned to short-term thinking; in Smith’s eyes, the opposite is true, in fact.
“We enter into long-term deals on all our properties, whether it's World Snooker with the BBC [or] PDC with Sky. Our [Matchroom Boxing] DAZN deals have always been five or six years. I think you have to align with partners. It has to be a long-term vision. You can't be in and out, but you have to, at the same time, evolve with what is going on around you, and you must have the right partners to do that.”
Matchroom Boxing made the switch from linear broadcast to OTT streaming via DAZN internationally back in 2018, and followed it up with a switch from Sky to DAZN in the UK in 2021.
That initial move in 2018 sparked a billion-dollar relationship between the two, but if anything, Smith believes it may have come about “too early” for the promotion, pre-empting the general shift in combat sports to the streaming market before its total ascendency in the early 2020s, but it’s a move that he says Matchroom “believed in”, and one that pre-empted the later shift from other promotions such as rivals Queensberry.
“You need a partner across all of these [sports] that's actually going to invest their time and effort into it. Money is great, but if you just have money and no journey or plan to build with a partner, you're going to stay in the same place.
“So with all of our products they have, DAZN is the home of boxing. So for us, that is the natural fit for us to be there. We're the biggest boxing promoter in the world. And that fits for us. They push our shows and push boxing. It’s a huge part of their business.”
The stability a long-term broadcast partner brings, Smith continues, naturally helps to insulate promotions from the struggles of the industry. “Boxing is the worst business in the world to be involved in,” he explains, “[Because] without the talent it would be nothing.”
Smith compares promoting boxing to the likes of darts and snooker, which in the past year have sold out iconic UK venues such as the Alexandra Palace and the Crucible, respectively, without any announced participants. By comparison, he speculates, a simple boxing event solely branded after the promoter with no announced fighters would struggle to sell at all. The added human factor of boxing as a talent-based business is the differentiating factor.
Perhaps the biggest change in boxing in recent years, beyond streaming and TV deals, has been the growth of Saudi Arabia as a top-line events host, and the meteoric rise of Saudi General Entertainment Authority chief Turki Alalshikh as boxing’s new premier power broker.
“He's changed the sport, and he's brought people together,” Smith says of boxing’s newest top matchmaker, pointing to the relationship now growing between Matchroom and rival promotion Queensberry, which he is credited with aiding. “I think he has been very beneficial for the sport. I think what he's done has been brilliant.
On the maintained Saudi interest in boxing, through which the country has plied many tens of millions of dollars, Smith continued: “You have to evolve as the business evolves. Consistently in boxing, when you look back over the years, there's always a huge investment in the sport.
“Whether it's Turki Alalshikh starting in 2023, before that, you had Triller, then it was DAZN, and before that, you had [Premier Boxing Champions] with $500 million of private investment. You have to evolve with the sport as new entries come into the market.”
Pushing the company forward
Smith, alongside both Eddie and Barry Hearn, served as the focal point for a recent documentary, Matchroom: The Greatest Showmen, which detailed the inner workings of the multi-sport promotion. The documentary is available on the streaming service Netflix, which over the past year has sought to muscle its way into the global boxing broadcast arena, showcasing high-profile superfights such as Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson, and Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez vs Terrence Crawford.
While these fights certainly proved major viewership draws globally, it is sports documentary content that Netflix, and many others, have invested even further into in recent years, a development that Smith sees as a positive one.
“It brings the business to a new audience,” he says, referencing other Netflix shows such as Drive to Survive and Break Point, both, like The Greatest Showmen, produced by Box to Box Films. He continues: “For us, it's not a financial play. We believe that what it can do for a business, that's what it can do here as well. So we're excited about the opportunities that this will bring, the markets it opens up.”
Netflix recently was an unsuccessful bidder to take up the rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship promotion, rights that ultimately went to US media giant Paramount, as its efforts to expand its sports portfolio continue. But this, in Smith’s mind, also exemplifies why the right media partner is crucial, as opposed to just the most prominent media partner.
“[Netflix] only wanted the major events. That's obviously the driver. They don't want to be doing 50 events a year. They want to be doing six or eight, which, obviously, as a business, you then have to look at and go ‘How do we continue, then, to build these other athletes to get into that position?’ And you need a network that's going to align with a vision for all of it.”
Matchroom’s stable includes global icons like Anthony Joshua and Katie Taylor, pound-for-pound ranked stars like Dmitry Bivol and Jesse ‘Bam’ Rodriguez, among others, and stands firmly next to the likes of Queensberry and Top Rank as one of the world’s elite promotions, but to maintain a promotion of this scale, and to continue the train of new talent coming through, you need visibility for all of Matchroom’s annual events, not just the cross-over superfights.
This also means that Matchroom has to continue to push into the unknown to create the capacity for Hearn and Smith’s voracious commercial appetite. “Our focus, in every business, is global domination across all the sports we’re involved in,” Smith outlines succinctly.
“We have competitors, obviously, in individual markets. But no other promoter is doing what we're doing, with shows in all different territories. In the early days, we went to Saudi Arabia in 2019 with the Anthony Joshua vs. Andy Ruiz rematch. We then went back there in 2022 with the Alexander Usyk-Joshua rematch. And then Turki Alalshikh came into boxing two years ago.”
The boxing landscape has changed drastically in that period, and could change more drastically still in the near future, with questions swirling around the viability of the pay-per-view broadcast model recently abandoned by UFC and WWE, and the launch of Alalshikh’s own boxing promotion, Zuffa Boxing, in collaboration with TKO, Matchroom will need to continue to be nimble to navigate these challenges.
But, Smith reminds, Matchroom is more than just boxing, and its goals for world domination are not singularly focused on the so-called ‘sweet science’.
“Darts is flying, and not just in the UK, but in Germany, Australia, Poland, the Middle East, it's going to a whole other level… China's a massive market for snooker,” he says.
“Everything we do is to continue to build on a global level. To take events to new territories and new markets, there's no limitation to where we can go with this.”
