By Sean McDaniel: WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan (24-1, 17 KO’s) may have shot himself in the foot by moving this Saturday’s fight against Paul McCloskey (22-0, 12 KO’s) from Sky Sports 3 to Primetime Pay-per-view. Eddie Hearn, the promoter for McCloskey, thinks it was a bad move by Khan, calling it “Commercial suicide,” according to the telegraph.co.uk. By moving from Sky to Primetime, Khan may have burned his bridges with Sky and be stuck with Primetime.

In the telegraph article by Gareth Davies, Hearn says “I feel sorry for Amir Khan. It was obviously bad news that he had to take a cut in moving from Sky Box Office to Sky Sports 3. He would probably have got 80 to 100,000 pay per view buys on Sky Box Office, but he would probably have had 700,000 viewers watching on Sky Sports 3. This was the chance to build him again with a much bigger UK audience. I doubt whether he will even get 5,000 buys on Primetime, which has no marketing budget at all for the event.”

Khan may be gambling that he’s a big enough star to get good PPV numbers without the need for the marketing that Sky would have provided for his fight with McCloskey. But it can’t help Khan if his fight with McCloskey is seen by less than 5000 fans rather than 700,000, which could have seen it on Sky 3. Khan needs to get seen more so he can become a bigger star in the UK. He seems to be putting the cart before the horse by having his fights put on PPV before he’s even become a huge star in his home country.

The advance sales of the Khan-McCloskey fight were poor and that was the major reason the Sky executives decided to move it from PPV to Sky 3. Perhaps it was the lack of a quality undercard for the event, because Matthew Macklin – Khoren Gevor and the Tyson Fury – Hasim Rahman fights fell apart. But it could be that boxing fans simply weren’t enamored with paying to see Khan fight McCloskey, a fighter that is only now cutting his teeth for the very first time in his career against an upper echelon opponent.

My guess is the undercard probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference here. The Khan-McCloskey fight seems to be the biggest problem. With Khan still not a huge star yet, he needed a big star to face him for him to get huge PPV numbers. McCloskey wasn’t the answer.