By Sean McDaniel: With WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan (24-1, 17 KO’s) and his team deciding not to agree to having the April 16th fight between Khan and unbeaten Paul McCloskey (22-0, 12 KO’s) moved from Sky Sports PPV to Sky Sports 3, a non-PPV channel, Khan has now decided to move to Primetime PPV for the McCloskey fight.

It looks like Khan is going to make sure he gets the PPV money he was looking to get. It’s unclear how fans will accept this because the interest in his fight against McCloskey has been low to say the least.

Khan took a big £1 million pay cut when Sky decided not to put his bout against McCloskey on PPV. Khan was set to receive a reported £250,000 for the McCloskey fight. Khan won’t make much more than that with Primetime according to reports, but it looks like he’d rather get as good a deal as he can for the McCloskey fight.

Sky Sports is looking after their subscribers and want to make sure they put on the best show possible for boxing fans. The advance sales for the Khan-McCloskey fight were dismal with approximately 50,000 buys. This suggests that Khan and his team may have misjudged the fan interest in seeing him fight a little known fighter like McCloskey.

Khan and his team wanted this fight for a long time. Who knows why but they seemed to have guessed wrong about fans from the UK being interested in this fight as well. To help gain interest for fans to purchase the Khan-McCloskey fight the undercard was supposed to have had some decent fights with Tyson Fury vs. Hasim Rahman and Matthew Macklin facing Khoren Gevor. Both of those fights failed to materialize, leaving the following fights on the undercard Rendall Munroe vs. Andrei Isaeu, Craig Watson vs. Lee Purdy, Martin Murray vs. John Anderson Carvalho and Graeme Higginson vs. Andy Murray.

Those fights are somewhat interesting bouts but not the kind of fights needed to make this a PPV bout you would think. With Khan choosing an unknown fighter who is less than hugely popular and not considered much of a threat to Khan, Sky Sports decided to move the Khan-McCloskey fight to Sky 3.

Khan may have been better off keeping the Khan-McCloskey fight on Sky 3, because at boxing fans would get to see him fight and it would help draw interest in Khan’s fight with Timothy Bradley during the summer. By having his fight with McCloskey shown on Primetime PPV, Khan will get viewer fans watching the fight and it surely won’t help him drum up interest for his bout against Bradley in July.

It looks like if Khan is going to want to have his future fights shown on Sky, he’s going to have to forget about taking soft tune-ups or facing obscure fighters and will have to focus on facing only the best time after time. That’s the way it should be, but Khan hasn’t always taken on the best fighters since being knocked out by Breidis Prescott in 2008.

We’ve seen a lot of less than impressive fighters in there with Khan and many of his fights have blow-outs or one-sided affairs that have been less than pleasing to watch. You can’t blame Sky for wanting to avoid putting on another one-sided affair with Khan facing McCloskey and having Sky subscribers pay to see this fight.