Like many kids in Alabama in the 2000s, I didn’t grow up in a boxing-centric household. I heard stories of Marino, Sanders and Favre – not Tyson and Foreman.
Regardless, when Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather met in September 2015, the world stood still, and like many we broke our norm, purchased the pay-per-view and stood with it.
The two titans of the sport, both in the twilight of their primes, dealt blows for 12 rounds at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and were broadcast to the largest pay-per-view audience in history, with Mayweather winning by unanimous decision (and the two pocketing a combined $300 million).
Netflix’s sports division announced this week that the two would meet again this September, nearly 11 years to the day from their first match, to headline a card for a prime time event that the service’s Vice President of Sports, Gabe Spitzer, called a “full circle moment.”
So what’s the problem? It’s 2026.
“Money” Mayweather retired from professional boxing in 2017 with a perfect 50-0 record as one of the richest athletes in history. Now 49 years old, he’s decided to return to the ring alongside 47-year old Pacquiao, who also recently came out of retirement.
It’s more spectacle than competition, which is nothing new for those paying attention to Netflix’s boxing productions. The streaming service famously platformed 27-year-old YouTube influencer Jake Paul’s “boxing match” against a then 57-year-old Mike Tyson in 2024, proudly touting that it was the most streamed sporting event in history in addition to being their first.
Paul, who began boxing in 2018 as part of a trend of “Influencer Boxing,” is convinced he’s revolutionized the sport with his slew of matches versus has-beens and MMA fighters. Netflix thinks the same thing for giving it a platform. They’re both right, but to revolutionize is not always to change something for the better.
Sure people tuned in, and many will tune in to watch the two men nearing 50 this fall, but it wasn’t long ago fans of the sport had the Fury vs. Wilder trilogy, Joshua vs. Klitschko and Alvarez vs. Golovkin to look forward to, among others.
It’s not easy to pin-point one event or person that’s responsible for this sudden flip in quality.
The impending doom of the outdated and far too expensive pay-per-view system certainly plays a role, with more and more fights being paywalled on the ever-growing array of streaming services.
One of those, DAZN, is an overpriced and under-marketed fighting-exclusive platform, featuring some of the great young boxing and MMA talent from across the world for the low price of $30.99/month.
On the topic of marketing, like baseball before Ohtani, Judge and Witt Jr., the sport is in need of young stars for this generation of fans to become invested. They’re out there, but they’re being held back by the paywalls they fight behind. Jesse Rodriguez, Shakur Stevenson, Junto Nakatani, Devin Haney – all under 30 years of age.
Netflix had a chance to do something truly revolutionary: to make quality boxing accessible. With 300 million worldwide subscribers, they’re the most popular streaming service on the planet. By pitting two young stars head-to-head, they could usher in a great new rivalry as well as a generation of fans.
Instead, they’ve opted to puppeteer these retirees, along with the sport as a whole, in front of us to garner the largest audience it can.
So no, this is not a “full-circle moment,” this is a gross pandering of nostalgia to fans of a sport in dire need of young superstars and real competition.
