The message that DAZN CEO James Rushton has for U.S. sports fans is simple: “Watch out for us because we’re coming.”
The DAZN streaming service (pronounced “Da Zone”) has made rapid inroads in other international markets, especially Germany and Japan, and will launch in the U.S. later this year headlined by a massive $1 billion investment in boxing. The subscription service hopes to garner acclaim and name recognition through boxing and international sports—many of the domestic U.S. broadcast rights are tied up for a while—before pivoting to becoming a more inclusive, multi-sport competitor to networks such as B/R Live and ESPN+.
In Japan, DAZN has the rights to 11 of the 12 Nippon Baseball League clubs, as well as MLB games, that country’s domestic soccer league, and several international circuits. In Germany, DAZN has exclusive English Premier League rights and significant Champions League holdings. In Canada, DAZN carries every NFL game, MLS match, and Champions League contest.
In the U.S., the first six fighters have reportedly signed with Matchroom Boxing USA as part of DAZN’s investment in having 16 annual fight notes. Former ESPN president John Skipper has joined Perform Group (which owns DAZN) as executive chairman.
After appearing on a panel at the Leaders Sport Business Summit in New York recently, Rushton sat down with SportTechie for an extensive conversation about DAZN’s plans for the U.S. market. Neither a launch date or a price point have been revealed, but DAZN offers a trial month free and no long-term contracts.
(Note: This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
SportTechie: What’s the elevator pitch you’d give to the average U.S. sports consumer about why they should subscribe to DAZN?
Rushton: The elevator pitch is, We’re on your side. We’re a business that’s been created by sports fans for sports fans. We think that you’re getting a bad deal, and we believe over time that we’re going to be the platform to give you a better deal. We’re going to start off with great fight sports content and international sport, but we have ambitions to go much bigger and bolder than that.
SportTechie: Boxing is a bold first move but intuitively makes sense given the fractured market. What else have you learned from your market research?
Rushton: The data points to a few things, right? It points to the fact that there is a significant number of people who are interested in paying for boxing in the States, first of all. It also points to the fact that, of that population, a fair few of them are below 40. They are naturally skewed more toward cord cutters than not, which is great.
But, most importantly for us, there was a general consensus amongst the industry but also the market research we’ve done, that people are pissed off and fed up with paying 100 bucks, 80 bucks, for a fight. Whilst it’s pretty cool because you all get to go to your buddy’s house and watch it together, actually, for boxing to get back to what it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s and be a mass market sport that everyone can name divisional champions and they appear on the Jimmy Fallon show, you’ve got to be actually fighting more than one mega-event every 18 months. There has to be a pretty interesting fight that creates a narrative around the sport every month, or every other week, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
It’s not just about not putting it behind pay-per-view. It’s about the regularity and the quality of the content so the next Evander Holyfield or pick-your-star is understood and their story’s understood and there’s a fandom created around those fighters that is not purely generated by the boxer and the promoter themselves to sell pay-per-view.
SportTechie: There certainly aren’t many household names in boxing in this country.
Rushton: Exactly. And it’s not great if you’re a boxer either. I’m just going to give you an illustration—and these aren’t the right numbers. If the total boxing ecosystem is worth a billion dollars a year and Pacquiao and Mayweather suck up $850 to $900 million of that, that’s not great for the rest of boxing. As fighters, you don’t know what your next five years of income could be. You don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know how your next fight is going to work. And that’s when the politics get involved.
If you can say to a boxer, “Come to Matchroom USA. You’ll be broadcast on DAZN. We understand the sport. We have 16 nights a year. Four or five of those nights are going to be massive, but they’re all going to be premium quality events. You’re going to get paid properly.” Are we going to get every single champion and contracted boxer to walk over? No, of course not. But over the next two years, I think we’ll see a real seismic shift in boxing. And that can only be good for the sport.
SportTechie: So then the question becomes, what next? Some of the rights are tied up for a while, at least the big ones, but what made this the right time given the lag on some of the other ones?
Rushton: We are a multi-sport service. We’re not here to say DAZN is a fight sports channel or boxing broadcaster. So we’ve got some work to do. We’ve got to create some deals, and we’ve got to move the needle on some stuff.
I think where we’re focusing is on the sports that are, A, available. There’s no point in me going to knock on Roger Goodell’s door right now because his [NFL] rights are locked up for a long time.
SportTechie: Except Thursday night in a couple of years.
Rushton: Well, in a couple of years, yeah. You never know. So, where my head’s at is, we’ve got to be famous at stuff. We can be famous in boxing and fight sports. We need to get big on the international sports that are in the market at the moment, so soccer, cricket, rugby. We own WTA tennis [rights] globally, through Perform Group. That right is not [available] here currently, but we may be able to look at that over the medium term. And, broader, a set of rights around—and I hate to use the word because it sounds like it’s not important—more niche properties but niche with a mass audience.
From there, prove the business model, and then so when we walk into a conversation with a UFC, that was on stage with us today, or a MLB, NBA, NFL, and talk to them about what they’re plans are for the next cycle or what they’re doing with their OTT package of rights, we are credible. They know us as Perform Group and DAZN—we’ve worked with them all around the world, but we’ve got to show ourselves as credible here. We think that boxing, fight sports and international sports will over the next 12 to 18 months or two years give us enough market power to launch the service and generate a solid business. By that point, we can say we’re serious, we’re credible and we’ve got a decent subscriber base, now let’s accelerate it onto the rest.
SportTechie: Twitter had no rights before the NFL, so having credible or proven backing is not necessary.
Rushton: That helps, and we’re a startup within a broader, more mature business. And that broader, more mature business is owned by Access Industries, and Access Industries is owned by Len Blavatnik, who’s not shy of a few quid, as they say over in England. Len’s a massive supporter of this and believes in what we’re doing.
That’s not to say it’s kamikaze time, and we’re going to start writing checks that don’t make sense. But everything we do is very data-driven and very scientific. Build a brand, build up a consumer proposition based on our fight sports like boxing and other international sports that I can’t really name—but in the next six to eight weeks, we’ll start to be announcing them. That’s a pretty good start.
SportTechie: Do you have a date in mind for launch?
Rushton: End of the summer, early fall. We need to get moving. Part of the story around Matchroom USA and the boxing is that we need to be out there putting on shows and showing how good our product is, so the sooner we do that, the better it is for us.
SportTechie: In the U.S., there are so many sports leagues and college conferences. That seems like an abundant market.
Rushton: And so [we’re] thinking about how we get into those markets, those rights. DAZN traditionally has been a content acquirer, but we’re also a channel aggregator. In Canada, we broadcast the beIN channel. We broadcast the MLB Network. There are opportunities for us to do that here either with the networks themselves or with the RSNs [regional sports networks]. There will be opportunities over time to collect [rights] and suit the local market distribution in how content is currently sold.
SportTechie: Is the RSN phenomenon in the U.S. comparable to any other market?
Rushton: It’s also an opportunity, right? We have the opportunity to work with rights holders on a national basis. We can’t buy NFL rights for X amount of years, but can we work with some local broadcasters whose channels have some NFL content or MLB content or NBA content—name what you will—in that particular DMA region? It provides challenges, but it also provides opportunities.