By Dan Ambrose: WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan’s fight with Paul McCloskey was moved from Sky pay-per-view to Sky 3 after two of the undercard’s better fights went up in smoke. Khan rather than seeing the benefit of fighting in front of 600,000 to 700,000 potential Sky Sports subscribers opted to move his fight to Primetime PPV. However, one of the reasons that Sky opted to switch Khan’s fight from PPV to Sky 3 was the poor pre-fight sales of the PPV bout.

It seems that Khan’s name alone wasn’t enough to make up for a lack of a quality undercard and the lack of an opposing big named fighter to mix it up with him. Eddie Hearn, the promoter for McCloskey, isn’t happy with the fight being moved off of Sky because he feels that less people will be willing to pay to see the fight on Primetime. Hearn thinks that as few as 4000 to 5000 fans could end up purchasing the fight on Primetime because of a lack of marketing.

Khan still sees himself as a big PPV attraction in the UK, saying this in an article at the dailymail.co.uk: “I know I’m a pay-per-view boxer here. My fights are always exciting but they have decided to take me off Box Office after the most thrilling one of all. Yet HBO think it’s worth coming over here to showcase this fight in American as part of their building me up to be a major pay-per-view fighter over there.”

What Khan says is true about HBO hoping that Khan can become one of their big PPV starts in the U.S. However, HBO hasn’t had a much luck in some of their fighters making the leap to regular HBO fighters to HBO PPV starts. Andre Berto is just example. HBO has been showing his fights for the past three years on their network, yet Berto is still a non-star in the U.S. Khan, for his part, has had a handful of fights and looked terrible in his last bout against Marcos Maidana. That performance didn’t suggest that Khan will be a future star. It looked like someone who was on the verge of being knocked out, as Khan was hurt in the 10th and badly brutalized by Maidana for the last three rounds of the fight.

Khan may or may not be a PPV attraction in his own country in the UK. But it looks like it’s going to take for to fight a better class of opponent for him to get the big PPV numbers. To be sure, Khan’s fights can be put on Primetime PPV every time out, but if he’s only getting between 4000 to 5000 buys, which is pitiful, what’s the point? You can’t call yourself a PPV attraction if you’re not bring in the numbers. It may be that Khan needs to go back to fighting on regular cable television and wait until he becomes a huge star before he starts having all of his fights put on PPV. His fight with Timothy Bradley may not do much better than McCloskey, because Bradley is an unknown in the UK, and not even a huge star in the U.S market.