Top Rank Promotions, the outfit that supported the careers of Muhammad Ali, “Sugar” Ray Leonard and Manny Pacquiao, put on its last boxing event for ESPN on Saturday night. As rising stars like Bruce Carrington and Xander Zayas showed out at The Theater in Madison Square Garden, fans watching at home may not have realized that the fight card could be boxing’s last on a major linear TV network for the foreseeable future.
In February, ESPN declined to renew its distribution deal with Top Rank after eight years. Top Rank regularly aired event cards on ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN+, the network’s subscription streaming platform.
During those years, the duo made stars out of current and former champions like Tyson Fury, Vasiliy Lomachenko and Naoya Inoue. Top Rank was even one of the first sports outfits to stage events during the social distancing lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving ESPN a programming boost outside of The Last Dance.
Yet as Disney’s sports division extended multiyear, billion-dollar pacts for college football, the NFL and NBA over that period, it has shown to be more discerning when it comes to its combat sports properties. That includes the UFC, which has a deal that expires in December.
“We wish Top Rank well on their future and appreciate the collaboration over the past eight years,” ESPN wrote in an emailed statement.
Boxing’s presence on linear television has diminished greatly over the past decade. As of now, all the major English-language national TV networks have exited the sport.
HBO aired its final fight card in 2018 after 45 years, with the legendary Jim Lampley calling fights for most of that period. Paramount’s Showtime followed suit in 2023 after its own 37-year run with the sport. Both premium cable networks built their brands as much on the sweet science as they had on prestige scripted shows and first-run movies.
Top Rank and ESPN previously divorced in 1996 after a 16-year run when ESPN wanted to build its Friday Night Fights program with different promoters. Top Rank’s return to ESPN in 2017 was touted as the most comprehensive arrangement in boxing history with one media partner. The network also signed a two-year deal with Golden Boy Promotions, the group run by Oscar De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins that was looking for a post-HBO home.
Along with UFC programming, bringing on Top Rank and Golden Boy was a way to fortify ESPN+, which streamed spillover programming from its linear siblings and college sports outside of the major athletic conferences. With exclusive streaming events, simulcasts from the linear channels and pay-per-view events featuring the big-name fighters, ESPN+ seemed to become the streaming heir apparent to HBO and Showtime.
The ESPN deals also stood out because they were made two years after the ambitious-but-flawed attempt by longtime boxing manager Al Haymon to build Premier Boxing Champions on linear TV beginning in 2015.
Instead of negotiating with networks for rights fees, Haymon purchased time buys on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox along with their sports and entertainment cable siblings in exchange for cuts of advertising revenue. In 2018, all of those networks let their multiyear time buy deals lapse, but PBC signed traditional rights agreements with Fox Sports and Showtime, giving those networks distribution rights for its pay-per-view events.
With the shuttering of Showtime Sports and Fox declining to renew its deal in 2022, PBC moved fully into the streaming world in late 2023 with Prime Video, with its initial plans of streaming 10 to 12 cards per year. Despite Prime Video’s reach—included in Amazon Prime, the service is available to 180 million U.S. Prime subscribers and 20 million more globally—PBC’s events have yet to break through.
Golden Boy didn’t stay with ESPN very long, either. Having already signed an agreement with sports streamer DAZN in 2018, it moved all its events to the platform after the ESPN pact expired. The promoter maintains a presence in Spanish-language TV but has not broadcasted a card on a major English-language channel since 2020.
Top Rank hasn’t revealed much on its media future. In an interview for the boxing podcast Cigar Talk, Top Rank chairman Bob Arum said the company (which is represented by CAA) is in talks for future distribution.
“They’re putting together a deal for us with a number of different outlets, which is what everybody is doing,” Arum said in the interview. “No longer relying on just one outlet, which we have done just like everybody else.
“We are currently talking to a number of different entities, and I believe we’ll have two, maybe three outlets for Top Rank product.”
Prior media reports said preliminary talks with Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t go very far. Netflix currently has a deal with Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian’s Most Valuable Promotions, while WBD has not indicated interest in bringing boxing back into the fold after HBO’s 2018 exit.
Although the Top Rank deal has come to an end, ESPN may not fully exit the boxing space—or combat sports as a whole—for good as it prepares for the launch of its new over-the-top streamer. (ESPN+ will be absorbed into the new service when it launches later this year.) UFC’s newest sibling, TKO Boxing, could be packaged with the MMA promoter, although it’s an untested brand so far. Its first official card will be the Canelo Alvarez/Terence Crawford event on Netflix this September.
