Nick Khan's Plan to Let the Boxers Box

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1:04Congratulations! You made the varsity, the podcast. My name is John O 'Ran. I'm Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. Well, Las Vegas is going to have a big fight night this weekend, so I asked Nick Khan to join the pod. Nick, of course, is the president of WWE and he's a TKO board member. So we're going to spend a lot of time talking about Zufa Boxing, WWE, and the business as a whole. Nick's a great guest and I'm really happy to have him on. But before we get to Nick, today is Wednesday, September 9th, and here's what I'm watching. Anyone who listens to this podcast regularly knows my thoughts on the current state of the TV business.

1:40It's a declining business and has been for the last decade or so. But there still are some areas or networks that are worthy of a mention. And one of those is the Big Ten Network, which launched 19 years ago this week. And what a launch it was. None of the cable operators really wanted to carry the network. But its first game 19 years ago was that amazing Appalachian State upset at Michigan, which created so much buzz and put so much pressure on cable companies to end up cutting a deal and carrying it. Even today, it's still a staple of sports media every fall. Last year, for example, the network averaged 700 ,000 viewers per telecast, the second highest college football viewership for a cable channel.

2:22Incredible. Okay, now let's get to Nick Khan. Nick Khan, it is always a total pleasure to have you on the pod. Thank you for joining us. I want to get started by just talking about TKO, Zufa, your entrance into boxing. This coming weekend, you have this sort of as, you know, the whole strategy behind what you were doing with boxing. You can see this weekend in Vegas, a welterweight title fight, Ryan Garcia, Connor, Ben. Take us through sort of how that got developed. I know Paramount is going to be covering it and how that fits in with the entire boxing strategy that you have over at TKO and Zufa.

3:06Number one, good to see you. tell us first what's going on at the valuation of puck? Where do we stand with this? I'm reading things. I want to know how it benefits you and Bellany and John and all the good folks there. Tell us the valuation. Tell us all the inside stuff. You know, Nick, I'm so glad you asked that. Nothing's been signed yet. And we've been told that the penalty on our life not to comment on any reports that are in the press. So I can't confirm their denial. But now the reporter and the reporters are forced to no comment. I can't discuss it. I'm not prepared to discuss it at this time.

3:46Who invited you on here, Nick? Who invited you? Come on. Listen, I work for you. I work for you. So I'm just taking over this podcast and trying to make sure everybody knows how big you guys have made Puck. Puck has been a rocket ship going forward. I'm very glad to be over here. I've been here for two and a half years at Puck, and it's been the ride of a lifetime, man. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Look, in terms of this coming weekend, obviously, you know, when Dana White sat down with myself and Mark Shapiro and Ari Emanuel and Andrew Schleimer, who's our CFO and who's much more than a CFO.

4:24And he said, you know, I do think, you know, I'd be ready to do this. we then sort of took a look around and said hey this sport of boxing when it's great there might not be anything better the problem is it's just not great often enough how do you sort of recreate part of the model not the inside the ring stuff let the fighters fight and the best fight the best which is something that hasn't happened in boxing for some time we sat down with our partners from the Gulf region, Turkey Al-Sheikh and Rakan Al-Harty from the Seller Group. And we said, hey, look, we would only do this if you did it with us.

5:07And they had invested a lot of money into the sport of boxing. And I think, you know, liked the return on their then investment, but saw the so many flaws in how the sport was run. And I'm sort of, I'm certainly not suggesting, hey, we're coming in overnight and we're going to change things. We don't make big declarations like this. What I can tell you is this coming Saturday, you have two of the best 147 pound welterweight fighters in the world. Ryan Garcia from the United States, Conor Benn from the United Kingdom fighting each other on Paramount Plus in the U.S. and Latin America and Canada and Australia for the simple subscription price of Paramount+.

5:53There's no$50 on top. There's no$75 on top. It's simply that. And by the way, DAZN, also our partners in this, in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and a number of other territories, they've been great. And let's see, come this Saturday, September 12th, let's see who wins that fight. It'll be a good one. All right, so we talked when you got into the boxing business And anybody that's followed boxing, you know, the heyday back in the 80s, you know, maybe extending into the 90s. And then it just became like, you know, just so many different titles and so many different, you know, it was like herding cats of sorts.

6:34You wanted to get in. You wanted to sort of make it simpler. You wanted to bring the best fighters together, kind of do the UFC thing. Getting into an established business, I'm certain that you have faced headwinds. Like what what has it been like to sort of enter into the boxing arena to try to, you know, fix boxing? Well, look, if past is ever prologue, there's two companies that entered into fragmented sports spaces and were able over time to create some sort of ecosystem where, again, the branding on the companies is significant. The best fighting the best is significant. Again, those two companies, by the way, UFC, keep in mind, everyone looks at the UFC now and sometimes forget about the hard work that Dana and the Fertitta brothers being across it prior to the 2016 sale.

7:32and Dana along with the UFC team and the TKO team, how they sort of took that MMA business, which at one point was pride fighting and won and a company called Elite XC and something I think called the IFC and all of these other MMA enterprises, which again, created a fragmented space and boom, they simply outworked everybody and developed a better product. If you go 20 years Plus prior to that, what was the other company that did it? WWE, WWF at the time. And obviously I was not here for that, but you had a wrestling system, certainly in the United States and internationally that was fragmented, that had different territories.

8:17There wasn't one world champion. And yes, there's predetermined outcomes in WWE, as everybody knows. But you had a founder who came in and said, hey, we got to actually make this a reliable system here where sponsors know that we have monthly events, monthly big events now called our premium live events, PLEs. We have weekly shows. You can depend upon us. You can call us. We know how to get sponsorship deals. We know how to get merchandise deals. We know how to sort of develop everything outside of the ring in addition to the in-ring product. Same at UFC, outside of the ring in addition to the in octagon product if if we can do that in boxing then the sport has a chance to survive and thrive what has been the most difficult part of that because you you do have i mean wwe when did when did vince do that that was back in the 19 uh i think early 80s early 80s early 80s wwe and by the early 2000s for the ufc with mma Okay.

9:22And so early 2000s, boy, that's still a quarter century ago, my goodness. But what is the actual roadmap that you're using for Zufa? It would seem to me to more logically mirror what you did with UFC. look it it that's the roadmap at the same time we understand you cannot catch lightning in a bottle twice so just because dana and the other good folks at ufc whose names i've articulated were able through hard work determination and smarts to get it it being the ufc to where it is today with still a massive growth trajectory doesn't simply mean oh that's how it's going to work in boxing. You're going to come in, the establishment is going to want to push back on anything new that you want to do.

10:08Doesn't matter to us. Does, do not care, does not matter. If you look at the modern history of boxing, you mentioned, hey, perhaps the, at its height in the 80s. Think about this. 1960, Rome Olympics, light heavyweight, Cassius Clay, gold medalist, 64, Four years later, Tokyo, Joe Frazier, gold, heavyweight. 68, George Foreman, Mexico City, heavyweight. 72, not as great. 76, perhaps the greatest American Olympic boxing team of all time. Sugar Ray Leonard, the Spinks brothers. 80, there's obviously a boycott. 84, perhaps the greatest American Olympic boxing team of all time. Evander Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor.

10:52So many. If you fast forward from there, from that moment, you see sort of the downward trend of amateur boxing in the United States. Yes, 1988 had Roy Jones and Riddick Bowe, but they weren't gold medalists. Roy Jones got robbed. 92 had De La Hoya, who was a fighter, was amazing, fought everybody. 96 Floyd Mayweather, but not with the fanfare as an amateur. If you fast forward again from that moment, one, one American Olympic male gold medalist since the year 2000 and Andre Ward won. So what happened? People stopped investing in the amateur system. We think a lot of the promoters simply took everything that they could out of the system.

11:39If you look at and didn't reinvest into it, if you look at UFC, you have a consistent basis of, hey, someone emerges as a superstar. Obviously, the shelf life for any fighter is only going to be so long. But when that person fades out, someone else is ready to take the mantle. Same in WWE. Again, predetermined outcomes, and we get that. But Hulk Hogan, you went from Hulk Hogan to The Ultimate Warrior, to Bret Hart, to Shawn Michaels, to Stone Cold Steve Austin, to The Rock, to John Cena, to Roman Reigns. There's a system in place that works at both of these entities. And let's see if it can be used to work well in boxing.

12:20Here's the thing about Nick Khan. before he went over to WWE and TKO, you were the top talent agent in the business working with CAA. You convinced big-time sports properties like the SEC to entrust you with their rights and sell their rights. And this is sort of my... I think this is probably what you're really good at in terms of convincing boxers to come to this new zoo for boxing and nobody knows what zoo for boxing is how did you convince them at first is it is it like look at my look at what i've done in my career or is it kind of a no it's it's it's never that because i think in this business number one it's a collective group of us who signs fighters here uh it's certainly not just me and assume dana you know is across all of that stuff.

13:18But we think about it this way. In our business, in the media business, in the combat sports business, in the publicly traded company business, you have to earn your keep every day. Nobody cares about the, hey, guys, guess what? Look what I did six years ago. No one cares about, look what I did six months ago. What they care about is what's the future going to look like? What does today look like? What's the future going to look like? And in my opinion, our presentation to the fighters who we've signed is, hey, if you like the old system, stick with the old system, where you really don't know who you're going to fight.

13:53You don't get much advance notice. You have, I'll give you an example. There's a terrific, terrific fighter named Bam Rodriguez signed with a different promotional company. Bam Rodriguez is from San Antonio. He last fought on the Knicks, the same date where the Knicks beat the Spurs to win the NBA championship. And now, could someone have predicted that San Antonio Spurs were going to make the final, so why put a San Antonio fighter on the same exact night? No. But everybody knows what the NBA final schedule is. So if you're doing a fight from the United States and Bam's fight, Again, he's terrific.

14:34But if you look at the promotion of that fight, why would anyone put a boxing event up against that game? Even if you didn't know it was Knicks and Spurs, which none of us knew until the conference finals were resolved. Why would you go head to head with that? If you looked on the sports calendar, simply one Saturday after that, it was a wide open sports weekend. We don't think people are putting thoughts into the most simple things like that. If we can do it and we can get it right, even if you look at this coming weekend, September 12th, again, Garcia, Ben, Paramount Plus in the United States, 8 p.m.

15:11Eastern for the main card, just so everybody has that, from T-Mobile in Las Vegas. If you look at that, well, it's Mexican Independence Day weekend. Ryan Garcia is Mexican-American. That's a big boxing weekend. Traditionally, Canelo has gone on that weekend. A year ago, along with Turkey Alshake, Dana White, myself and others, did Canelo Crawford on the same weekend, Mexican Independence Day weekend, at Allegiant Stadium with a record gate, the third highest gate in the history of boxing. With massive viewership on Netflix. We're able to convince Netflix to get into the boxing space on that fight, which was wildly successful for them.

15:53So that's Mexican Independence Day last weekend. It's Mexican Independence Day weekend coming up. Yes, there's college football, but that's the date of Mexican Independence Day weekend. So we're going. We have high hopes and expectations, as does Paramount. We think that fight will deliver. And at the end of the day, we think the results will speak for themselves. now nick you just went through the litany of uh olympic boxing champions and you ended pretty much in 1996 um you're coming to market in the u.s market promising boxing what was a what was a reaction that you got from the paramounts the foxes the espns to because everybody still likes boxing and i think the people in charge have a memory of what a big prize fight is like so yeah i want to sort of dive into that but they also know the history of uh boxing in the u.s it's been sort of it's been dormant as you as you pointed out for the past quarter century think about all the buyers in the u.s who have gotten out espn got out showtime got out and yes we understand showtime is is now paramount but before when it was under viacom showtime got out HBO got out.

17:11Fox came in. Fox got out. Spike got out. NBC got out. And why do they do it? Ultimately, at the end of the day, we think it comes down to two things. And this is what the network executives told us. They said decisions that should take two hours take two weeks. And you can't get straightforward answers from your partners. So when something is awry, you know this, John, in business, you're a master at it. When something is awry, pick up the phone and call somebody. Don't hide behind it. Don't run around and say it doesn't exist. Call and say, hey, there's an issue. Typically what I've found across the last 20 years or so in the media business is if you do that, usually you can figure out the problem with your partner.

17:57But if you run away from it or you're taking too long to give answers, at a certain point, they're like, this isn't worth it. And we think that was the case on all of those buyers that I just mentioned. They like it. They want the big prize fights. But ultimately, the partners that they chose, they chose part of me, under delivered for them. Our expectation is to come in strong, to work our behinds off, to outwork anyone in the space, as I think UFC has done for the last 25, 30 years, as I believe WWE has done for a time period of time longer than that to outwork everyone and to deliver a product that matters.

18:36If we can do that, then we have a chance.

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19:16This weekend's fight is in Vegas. Of course, there have been fights in Madison Square Garden, but I know that you've looked at other markets. What makes you pick or decide a market that might be good to hold to host a prize fight? Look, if you look at the fights that we've done, keep in mind, we're only nine months into this venture. If you look at the fights that we've done, we've done Las Vegas, we've done Bournemouth just outside of London, we did Dublin, we did New York, which you had just mentioned, and we've done a number of fights from the meta apex in Las Vegas. This one felt like Las Vegas was written all over it.

20:02Number one, you're going to have a big Southern California crowd coming in, Mexican-American crowd, Mexican Independence Day weekend, Mexican-Americans and Mexicans coming in. Also, what we're seeing is that Brits are traveling in for Conor Benn. Ticket sales have been robust. Action surrounding the fight, We think starting at the outset of this promotion has been terrific. And you're going to see more and more of that this week, even with the Wednesday opening night NFL game on NBC and Netflix's game from Australia on Thursday. The NFL is the NFL and all credit to Roger Goodell and his team and the partners he has in the owners for getting it there.

20:46But you're going to see a ton of attention on Garcia Ben this week. we have the best promoter in the history of the fight game, Dana White, promoting this fight. He has a megaphone that he's earned. He can get the word out there. And oh, yeah, by the way, WWE has 600 million plus social media followers. We have 114 million subscribers to our YouTube channel, which makes us the 10th most subscribed to YouTube channel. Those numbers, you know, quite robust, again, on the UFC side, building on the Zufa boxing side. But we get the word out there in a way that other promoters don't, even for streamers and influencers.

21:25If you notice, there's a gentleman named Neon who's significant in that space. He spent a good portion of a day with Ryan Garcia a few days ago, all, you know, again, to promote September 12th, the fight this upcoming weekend. All of that resonates with a young audience, which is why our research and independent research shows that boxing is the fourth favorite sport amongst young fans. And you might say to yourself, oh, it feels like it would be an old person sport. Not true. It's tailor-made for digital. There's knockout punches. You don't have to explain the rules to anybody. It's you see somebody get knocked out, you know what's happened.

22:02It's an easy sport to pick up. It's tailor-made, like I said, for an online audience. And with the right fighters, young, charismatic great fighters like Garcia and Ben with a promoter like Dana, we think we have a chance. Only nine months in. It feels like years. That's incredible. That's wild to see. A lot has happened in the past nine months. I want to hop to WWE here, the other hat you're wearing, and I want to ask you sort of a media question. ESPN, Netflix, give me a lay of the land right now from a WWE perspective about how those deals are going? Sure. So Netflix has our weekly show Monday Night Raw globally.

22:47It's been terrific. We think, you know, you have to get a little bit of luck in life and in business, John. The luck we had there was Netflix saying after many years of saying that we're not going to get into the ad supported business, all of a sudden getting into it. And I've mentioned this previously, lead. There's an executive there named Brandon Reed, who when I was in my prior profession, I had the good fortune of representing WWE. This is pre-COVID, you know, seven, eight years ago, told myself and Stephanie McMahon at the time, hey, I'm not saying we'd ever get into live, but if we did, you should probably line up your international rights at WWE because Netflix is not in the business of, hey, guess what?

23:27Big news. We're announcing a deal with WWE in two small countries. They wanted global rights. So we did that. WWE did that. And boom, the Netflix deal was born. So far, so great. In September of last year, we shifted our premium live events, events like WrestleMania, over to ESPN Unlimited. That's a new service, different than ESPN Plus. So it's going to take a moment in time for the consumer and the fan to understand, And, okay, what's the difference between ESPN and ESPN2 and ESPN Plus and ESPN Unlimited and Hulu and Disney Plus? We think that's all been clarified now. Off to a great start. Our Friday show, SmackDown, is with our longtime partner, USA, in the United States.

24:12It's with Netflix internationally. And that has been doing quite well for Versant. They've continued to be terrific partners who are accessible at all times. And then we bought a Lucha Libre company called AAA about a year and a half ago. We have that intentionally on YouTube outside of Mexico where it's on Fox Mexico. And that's the Rupert Fox, not to be confused with the other Fox where there's some litigation and stuff that we have nothing to do with. So part of being on Fox Mexico is being on Tubi. That's free to air in Mexico. We love that for that country. and YouTube is obviously free globally.

24:54So you're seeing significant audience growth in our Lucha Libre AAA product. And by the way, we also have our other weekly show, NXT on CW in the United States, which is where our wrestlers develop before ultimately being called up to the main roster. So, so far, so good. We're about a year and a half or so into most of those deals and about six months or so, no, a year now, pardon me, into the ESPN deal. And we have multiple years left on those to grow and maintain the quality that we think that we have built. Let's go dive down into the Netflix one. Every week when you get like the report coming from Netflix, what are you most interested in?

25:40Because there's never been a global number to put there. So are you interested in the ratings or is it all new? Is it sort of the ad money that's going into it? Where is your focus in terms of WWE Raw? We're interested in all of it. We want to know live viewership within the first 24 hours, viewership within the first week. WWE is one of the unique products where you actually don't have to watch it live because it's not simply, as you know, with let's say the NBA, You must watch it live or between X and social media and texting. And this was established decades ago. If you didn't watch it live, then someone would tell you the score and it blew the whole experience for you.

26:29WWE is different because it's not so much just about, oh, Roman Reigns won this match. It's how did he win the match? What's the storyline involved with it? What was the outcome after the match? That matters for WWE viewers. It's part of why our presence on social media is so significant, the numbers I mentioned earlier. So we want live viewership. We want ads. What are the ad space going for? Again, we want the delayed viewership. We want what countries is it working in? And for example, Netflix gave us a great note a year or so ago, John. They said, hey, when you go to Spain for a night, obviously viewership spikes in Spain.

27:09But if you stay in Spain for over a week and you do two to three shows there, then we think a lot of that spiked viewership will sustain because it'll acclimate the country to knowing, hey, WWE is here, boots on the ground. It's not just an American company piping out American content, which I no longer believe that we are. It's a global company looking to have a global footprint, which I'd like to think we've accomplished a lot of that with, of course, a lot of room for growth. Including WrestleMania next year. Is it going to be outside of the United States, right? Yes. It's never been outside of the U.S.

27:50or Canada. It's going to be in Riyadh. it's going to be a significant show. We're already across the creative. Of course, that's, you know, subject to any injury. We're already across the creative. And in addition to that, we announced two shows from the MSG Theater. WrestleMania Saturday will have a watch-along party followed by either NXT or AAA. And the next day, MSG Theater, a watch-along party followed by either NXT or AAA, whichever one didn't go on the Saturday night. So we're also going to do viewing parties and all of these things from the U.S. and other countries. And we think, you know, ultimately the fans will go home happy.