Boxing did not run out of fighters when major U.S. broadcasters pulled back from the sport. According to Zuffa Boxing executive Nick Khan, the people trying to put fights on television were frustrated by how long it took promoters to make basic decisions.
“This is what the network executives told us that decisions that should take 2 hours, take 2 weeks, and you can’t get straightforward answers from your partners,” Khan said during an appearance on The Varsity with John Ourand.
That complaint cuts through the nostalgia for boxing’s supposed golden era before Saudi money entered the sport. Fans had plenty of talented fighters to watch, but broadcasters needed promoters who could commit to fights, answer questions and deliver events on a workable schedule. Khan’s account suggests they often struggled to get even that.
A network can reserve a date and put money behind a card. It cannot make rival promoters agree on the main event. When negotiations drag on for weeks, the broadcaster carries the uncertainty while other sports offer schedules and matchups it can plan around. Khan’s two-hour-versus-two-week example makes that problem easy to see.
Saudi-backed cards have shown what can happen when a well-funded organizer pushes major fights across promotional lines. Zuffa’s pitch appears to address the other side of the equation: giving its broadcast partners a clearer path from a proposed fight to an actual event. Khan is describing the kind of business problem Zuffa believes it can solve.
His remarks do not establish one explanation for every network’s decision to leave boxing. They do, however, put responsibility on a part of the sport that fans rarely see. If promoters cannot give broadcasters timely answers or reliably deliver the fights they discuss, the quality of the fighters alone will not keep those broadcasters interested.