The Teofimo Lopez-George Kambosos fight will not be promoted by Triller according to a report from Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports.
CONFIRMED: Triller COO Thorsten Meier tells @YahooSports that Triller will not promote the #LopezKambosos fight. Already spent multiple millions trying to get the fight on. This is part of a much larger story coming soon to Yahoo Sports.
— Kevin Iole (@KevinI) October 2, 2021
Lopez won unified lightweight championship from Vasyl Lomachenko a year ago and has yet to defend the title. Triller won the purse bid for Lopez’s first title defense by outbidding Top Rank Boxing and others. The purse bid win was a sign of disrupting the status quo of boxing.
However, Triller’s strategy has failed badly. Lopez contracted COVID-19 in June which delayed the fight for the first time. It then went through several other stops and starts with Triller landing on Monday, October 4th. For some reason, Triller didn’t realize that this would pit them against Monday Night Football and a matchup between the Las Vegas Raiders and San Diego Chargers. Not only is it losing its deposit on the venue for MSG on Monday 10/4, it had secured the Barclay’s Center on October 16th prior to having the challenger signing off on the postponement.
Payout Perspective:
It would not be a surprise if we saw Triller leave the boxing space after this debacle. Not only will they lose millions of dollars not being able to put on this fight, it’s clear that the company did not know what it was doing with the scheduling and promotion. It will have to deal with lawsuits from Kambosos and possibly Lopez. The organization shows that in order to be successful, a plan must be in place with competent individuals running the promotion.
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