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The Floyd Mayweather fight was costlier for RIZIN & Fuji TV than first anticipated

By Zach Arnold | January 4, 2019

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The only good news for Nobuyuki Sakakibara is that Floyd Mayweather’s paycheck for the “exhibition fight” with Tenshin Nasukawa was $9 million and not $100 million USD.

Otherwise, it was an awful night for Japanese combat sports on New Year’s Eve 2018 television.

Tokyo Broadcasting System, which used to be home to mega K-1 and Inoki NYE events, finished with a 6.9% overall rating for their SASUKE show (athletic variety) plus Macau boxing event featuring Kazuto Ioka.

Fuji TV, which was home to powerhouse PRIDE, finished with a high of 7.5% for RIZIN for Floyd Mayweather’s fight. The overall ratings were 5.7%, 5.0%, and 6.9%. The day before Floyd’s fight, the Teiken Promotions boxing triple-header with Masayuki Ito, Ken Shiro, and Takuma Inoue pulled a 6.3% rating (8.8% in Kansai area).

The boxing numbers are a mixed bag but not a total surprise. The RIZIN rating figure is a big problem. Network executives don’t put up millions in cash for a distant fourth-place number in the high stakes Japanese ratings game of NYE.

If you’re intrigued by what used to go down politically with television producers on NYE events, go back and look through our archives. The level of detail and planning with ad agencies like Dentsu is exhaustive and extensive. Getting Mayweather for $9 million bucks was cheap by his standards but not cheap by anyone else’s. This hurts.

Where it hurts Nobuyuki Sakakibara is future investment. Yes, he proved that he could book Floyd Mayweather. There is some credibility built-in this maneuver because it will likely convince a private financier to perhaps open up a checkbook for a future show. However, the much more lucrative and bigger investment is with a Japanese network television partner.

If the Floyd Mayweather experiment had rallied a bigger number, such as 10%, the circumstances would be different today. That’s how important an extra 2% in the ratings would have been.

Topics: Boxing, Japan, Media, Zach Arnold | 10 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |

10 Responses to “The Floyd Mayweather fight was costlier for RIZIN & Fuji TV than first anticipated”

  1. Diaz's packed bowl says:

    Next up on the “Floyd Mayweather beats up the world tour”…
    Russia and a 3 round “exhibition” with Nurmagomedonezov.

  2. Sammy says:

    Deleting posts again are we? Truly pathetic.

  3. Sammy says:

    How embarassing

  4. Sammy says:

    That’s how you treat your long time readers? Because, let’s be honest, there aren’t many new readers. And save your breath before you say you can’t control the comments. What a douche.

  5. Sammy says:

    That’s probably one of the reasons why this site has had one foot in the grave it’s entire existence.

  6. Diaz's packed bowl says:

    This site is dead because Zach writes one article every 2 months, and its not anything really informative or provocative regarding MMA.
    Also the links to a variety of mma sites are gone, just a few or the worst sites that due to their patheticness I never read. So that eliminates any type of spontaneous conversation.
    Also, arbitrarily deleting some of the very few comments will loose you some readers for sure.
    In closing, you need to have some standards and maintain them.

    Big changes going on in mma, for the worse in America, for the better in Asia. lots to write about, if you have an opinion that is.

  7. Nepal says:

    It is a pity about this site. I read maybe one of 10 of Zack’s articles.

    It was the go-to place for MMA news for so many years. Now I click on it once or twice a week and find no new info. I only still click on it because I have been doing so for over 10 years. Soon even entrenched habits fade….

    Pity that.

    • Diaz's packed bowl says:

      For me too. Truthfully, with the sad state of american mma, and everything being a negative act to generate buzz, I’ve little interest in watching western mma. let alone read any of the grade school quality writing in 95% of mma sites.
      I’m looking at Fedor v Bader TJ v Sayjudo, Pico, Rani Yahya on a main card, and that’s it. For the rest of the year one’s and bellator tournaments are all i’m interested in for sports sake.

  8. Megaterio Llamas says:

    Yeah, what happened to all he website links? Zach isn’t writing much anymore but I still check in very couple of months reflexively somehow. Was the place tp be in’05. Long live Yakuza Zach!

  9. Diaz's packed bowl says:

    How about writing about how the Refs were ordered to stop the fight before it got too ugly at the first espn show in NY. The only 2 fights I watched were both stopped when the loosing fighter was actively shooting for a takedown. But thats the new ufc on espn for you… fake tits, dirt bag nfl players and quick stoppages.
    I might add that dc seemed to have had a few before stumbling through his commentary.

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