Devin Haney’s fight with Regis Prograis reportedly brought in a dreadfully poor 50,000 buys on DAZN PPV, nowhere near the projected huge numbers that some had believed it would bring.
It is unclear whether the terrible numbers resulted from piracy or fans saving their money for the holiday season. The real problem was two-fold:
1. Haney vs. Prograis wasn’t a PPV-worthy fight from the jump. Devin (31-0, 15 KOs) was coming off a controversial decision against his only notable opponent for his seven-year career, Vasily Lomachenko, and his boring, non-friendly style of fight, involving a lot of clinching, jabbing & running, wasn’t conducive to selling his fights on pay-per-view.
2. The undercard for the Haney-Prograis event was one of the worst that this writer has ever seen, even poorer than the historic Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao card in 2015. You got to really low to get worse than that, as that was a purely awful undercard, seemingly thrown together without much care, and all money going to the two main fighters, Floyd & Manny.
Obviously, the 50K PPV numbers will hurt Haney’s chances to lure Gervonta Davis to fight him because he’s not a big enough name for this fight to attract fans to purchase it on pay-per-view.
Those anemic PPV results show that Haney is NOT a draw, and it’s understandable why. His fighting style is painfully boring, similar to Shakur Stevenson’s, and he cherry-picks old guys, never fighting the killers.
Haney still needs two or three solid wins before a fight between him and Tank Davis would be a big-money maker and worth it for the promoters & networks to pump a bunch of dough into putting it together.
Devin should focus on beating these fighters to build his name up before targeting Tank Davis:
- Subriel Matias
- Teofimo Lopez
- Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis
- Ryan Garcia
- Terence Crawford
- Errol Spence
- Tim Tszyu
- Jermall Charlo
- David Benavidez
- Janibek Alimkhanuly
Adding 154, 160 & 168-pounders among the mix makes sense because Haney is essentially a super middleweight who had got the art of melting down to 140 down pat.
Haney looks like a manufactured fighter who is being marketed to make a quick buck but with no real substance behind him. It looked bad that he walked away from his controversial decision against a much smaller & older Vasily Lomachenko and chose another old guy, Prograis, to fight on PPV.
If Haney wants to show fans that he’s not a fake fighter, he needs to take on quality guys like Boots Ennis, Crawford, Spence, Matias, Benavidez & Janinbik to show that he’s for real.
The real #Haney–#Prograis PPV number is the low 50,000 on #DAZN PPV. My pre-fight number over/under was 65,000. We all know piracy is a big problem, but it also had a horrible undercard, & holiday season PPV's have never do good numbers in the U.S. Remember #Benavidez–#Andrade…
— Rick Glaser (@RealRickGlaser1) December 16, 2023
