By Ben James: The title of this piece is slightly misleading. Of course boxing has changed in the past few years but not as much as the attitude, expectation and intelligence of its fan base.

A few years ago the promoters plan was to take a decent fighter for example Joe Calzaghe, build him up fighting bums creating a padded record, then you test him against a higher profile fighter who is on the slide, in this case Chris Eubank. You use this well timed victory to raise the profile of your figher and after that you push him towards an easy world title shot or in the case of Calzaghe fight a high profile fighter who is on the slide for a vacant world title (Calzaghe vs Eubank – Vacant WBO title fight).

The next step in the process of extracting as much money from the general public as possible was to defend your title against lower level opposition wherever possible, holding onto the title for years, hyping up every fight and milking the fans for every penny you can get before you are finally forced to fight some tough opponents who have a chance of beating you.

Eventually your cash cow fighter will become unstuck and will lose, at this point the majority of the milking is over. Promoters will then be on the lookout for their next cash cow.

Anyway my point is fans have changed now. Unlike in the early Calzaghe years we all have access to the internet, a wealth of information and debate. This has allowed us to know more about fighters and their opponents. It is no longer acceptable to defend your world title against several bums in a row. We now demand that the best fight the best, or we just wont be interested.

A prime example of this is the Amir Khan vs Paul McCloskey fight this weekend. I am British and I have never heard of McCloskey before and I have no interest in watching him fight Khan, I certainly would not have paid PPV money to see it, and judging by Skys decision to remove the fight from PPV, the majority of fans obviously agree with me. Moving the fight to Sky Sports was a good move and much more people would have tuned in.

Its just a shame the greed of Khans family has caused him to burn his bridges with Sky and move to primetime. I guarantee primetime are going to lose money by showing this fight on PPV. They will regret this decision.

All of this could have been avoided if Amir Khan listened to his fans and fought a rematch with the guy who knocked him out clean in one round… Prescott. The original Prescott fight was Amirs first ever PPV fight and to be honest its an insult that they carried on billing Khan as a PPV fighter after losing his first ever PPV fight.

The biggest insult is Khan who is quoted as saying that the reason he is fighting McCloskey is because he promised the UK fans a big fight. That really is an insult to our intelligence. Nobody cares about this fight, I suspect most people are now hoping Khan will lose.

Fighters like Carl Froch have changed the game. Look at his record he has been fighting the best in tough fights for the past 3 years and he shows no sign of stopping. Carl Froch is a true warrior who knows what the fans want, for the life of me I can’t work out why the media do not give him the credit or attention he deserves. I guess it all demands on who your promoter is.