The rivalry between Canelo Alvarez and Gennadiy Golovkin has not lost its luster with the public, insists an executive at DAZN.
Alvarez and Golovkin will fight for a third time on DAZN Pay-Per-View September 17 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas for Alvarez’s four 168-pound titles. The two first fought in 2017 in a fight that ended in a controversial draw; Alvarez won the second bout in a close fight in 2018.
The trilogy was originally supposed to occur much sooner as part of DAZN’s American expansion. The streaming platform, which entered the US market in 2018, signed both Alvarez and Golovkin to hefty multi-bout deals with the intention to pair them up in a mega fight that would bring the newfangled company an influx of subscribers.
Despite the protracted gap between the second and third bouts, Joe Markowski, an executive vice president at DAZN, believes interest in the fight has not lagged with the public very much, if at all.
“The intrigue from the public has remained, 100 per cent,” Markowski told BoxingScene.com Monday afternoon at a news conference in Manhattan to announce Canelo-Golovkin III. “You can use any metric you want to look at, from a social media perspective, from a media perspective – we study the chatter of boxing fans.”
Markowski noted, however, that demand for the trilogy was certainly helped by the fact that Alvarez lost to Dmitry Bivol by unanimous decision in their light heavyweight title bout in May. Conversely, Markowski believes Golovkin’s late-round beatdown of Ryota Murata earlier this year to unify the WBA and IBF middleweight titles also helped renew interest in the trilogy. -BoxingScene.com
