By Ricardo Lezama 
In Japan, Australia and Mexico, fighters are just a bit more prideful over the control of their careers than most other places. In the aforementioned countries, with Mexico’s population overlapping with the US southwest both culturally and financially, boxers command a greater domestic popularity and market.
Now, that is a hard reality for US based boxers whose fanbases are not as strong, but enjoy ready syndication with top-tier entertainment providers, like Top-Rank and ESPN’s partnership, or DAZN and Golden Boy. These ingredients between distribution and content is easy to exploit and scale for fighters whose PPV numbers are either non-existent or simply anemic, as is the case for top fighter, Terence Crawford.
As a result, Saudi Arabia’s tourism dignatarie, Turki Alashikh, has begun dictating terms for some promotional firms in the United States and England. However, none of these tools have allowed him to fully subvert the traditional powerhouses that are pound-for-pound attractions, like Canelo, Tank Davis and Naoya Inoue. Fans are not keen on seeing just one entity dictate terms because they can sense danger and disaster for highly revered boxing figures.
Tszyu “doesn’t understand”, Tank needs to “get smart”, Canelo needs to take his offers “if he’s smart”, wanted to “make (Inoue) come to us, make him do fights in Saudi Arabia”.
— Bay_J (@bay_jev) August 11, 2024
This egomaniac has a pattern whenever someone has other options and is able to be independent of him. https://t.co/0vFoTeuK1c
Many think there is an inherent arrogance at making fights not necessarily even requested by fans or even realistically tied to one another. Most fans want fair fights at weight classes that make sense for both fighters. One of the valid criticisms for many fighters is their selective usage of weight classes to either drain or supersede their opponents strengths based on the scale’s direction (if too high for the opponent, they are slow, if too low, they are weakened, essentially). Thus, you can imagine why some have criticised David Benavidez for being so massive in the 168lb division. Or, Tank Davis for draining opponents with weight clauses. Or, in Canelo’s case, going too high up a division and having a built in excuse for decision losses (although, it is highly unlikely this move was done for anything other than competitive spirit e.g. Bivol vs Canelo in 2021).
In the case of Turki’s ingress into boxing, many have indeed welcomed his approach to creating fair fights and ones that fans see as potentially 50/50 affairs. The deep pockets of Saudi Arabia’s pension fund can permit for fighters to be paid handsomely for taking on the risk.
However, fans also lament that in his imperial hubris, Turki disregards the career trajectories of already well established fighters who do not need a defacto promoter and can entertain fans through their own means.