(Photo credit: Tom Casino/Showtime) By Rav: With WBA welterweight champion Adrien Broner (27-0, 22 KO’s) facing hard hitting Marcos Maidana (34-3, 31 KO’s) tonight, I’m struggling to see where is this superstar status coming from for Broner and here are the facts. Amir Khan as a prospect was selling out arenas in the UK fighting pretty much bums, but tickets were sold like hot cakes and also his fights were PPV.
We have seen Ricky Hatton, David Haye and Carl Froch sell 20,000 + tickets in no time and do tremendous pay-per-view numbers too. Last February, Broner fought Gavin Rees in front of barely 4,000 fans in Atlantic City, New Jersey. So where were his superstar fans? It seems to me Broner struggles to sell tickets. He also fought Paulie Malignaggi in his hometown in Brooklyn, New York last June, with the Malignaggi pulling in the majority.
Now, Broner will face Maidana tonight, and it’s not going to take place in Broner’s home city of Cincinnati, Ohio, but in San Antonio, Texas. In this fight, Maidana will likely have all the Mexican fans rooting for him due to him being from nearby Argentina, but it will be these fans that sell the fight.
Broner maybe a talented fighter but does he have a style that will build his own significant fan base that will buy tickets and sell out his arenas?
Mayweather doesn’t have a fan friendly style, but with that unbeaten record, he has become a star as people are intrigued to see if anyone can beat him. Plus, he only fights guys with fan bases of there own, so I think Broner is being marketed in the same way. The longer Broner keeps his unbeaten record the more marketable he becomes. But to say he’s already a superstar with a huge fan base is false at this point, as he can’t sell arenas of his own yet with his own fanbase.
Khan, Haye, Hatton, and Prince Naseem all were able to sell out arenas with their own fan bases no matter who they fought. I remember Khan fighting a guy I’d never even heard of as a prospect in the past, and the fight still sold 20,000 tickets and aired on PPV UK.
Broner’s got a long way to go to go before he gets to the level of super-stardom, but let’s see where his next fight will be. No doubt it’ll likely be in his opponents back yard as he has no real fan base as of yet.
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