Florian, good to see you. I’ve seen you making moves and you’ve signed a pair of heavyweight brothers, the Ademi (Ismet and Endrit) brothers.
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we are on our way to the top. We will bring German boxing back.
Have you been depressed with how German boxing has been the last 15 years or so?
To be honest, not so much because I know there are a lot of problems in the boxing scene, not just in Germany, but in the whole world. And in Germany, you know, we had the problem that we just built up names, not like the UFC and MMA in the States, we built up the names like Axel Schulz, Henry Maske, the Klitschko brothers.
And then the Klitschko brothers were gone and German boxing fell to sleep. So you see MMA works, combat sports works in Germany with Octagon MMA. So I think when we do the right steps at the right time, we can bring boxing back again in Germany because the target group is there.
How would you know the target group is still there?
Because you can see it when you watch it with the sport of MMA, you see Octagon, they make big moves, Octagon MMA. So the people like combat sports. And I think sports by itself, it’s so important for the audience.
And boxing is a great sport. Everybody feels close to it. And it’s something special. But we need to show it the right way.
We see the target group… when you look at the numbers of the boxing clubs, the numbers are growing. A lot of boxing stuff [equipment] is sold by the brands. Boxing works, fitness boxing and stuff like that, but the real boxing you see – Fame Fighting over in the UK, it’s the same like Misfits in the UK, we have Fame Fighting here in Germany. And it works. So the people like to see guys beating up each other.
But we need to build brands. We need the fighters to build their own brand, not just their record.
Are you the person that’s going to make it into big business again?
I hope so. I have a good team. We have a great vision. We have a good momentum. You said also the Ademi brothers, I think they are also a key because this is a new generation of German boxers. They know how social media works.
So they go to training, then they sit at home and stream. So for the audience, they know how the game works. So I’m pretty sure that we will come back and you see Agit Kabayel [against Nelson Hysa on November 28], he’s fighting now in front of 35,000 people.
And I think they sold in 24 hours, 25,000 tickets or something. So you see boxing works when you do it the right way. And we have a lot of innovative stuff, like our new format, Who’s Next? This is a digital, innovative boxing system. We let two teams fight against each other, four fighters on each team. We have team presidents, team leads. We have sensors in the gloves. We have a lot of data. We will show the audience the first event on Saturday.
So it’s a gamification of the sport of boxing. And I think this is the key to the younger generation. We make the sport faster.
Would you reach out to Frank Warren and Queensberry to get some fights on the Kabayel-Hysa bill?
Yeah, I think so. To be honest, we have at the same date, we have also a big event, a huge event where a lot of good fighters will be fighting like Labinot Xhoxhaj, which is the number 13 of the WBC rankings. He’s the EBU champion. Emanuel Odiase will fight there.
But, for sure, we will get in touch with them and show them our good fighters. I think our fighters will sell good tickets and we can push also the promotion.
Why is Kabayel so popular at the moment?
He showed that he’s a great boxer. He always went to the tournament [fight card] to lose and he won and it was impressive.
And you need to know that we have a huge Kurdish target group in Germany and Agit is their hero. I think a lot of the fans from Agit are from the Kurdish community, but now the media, the mainstream media also write about Kabayel. A lot of people from other businesses come to me and ask me about Agit Kabayel.
They reach a huge target group. I think we can do similar things with the Ademi Brothers and the Albanian community.
But my goal is not just to reach a single target group. I want to have the mainstream. I want to build up boxing like a mainstream media, like it was with the Klitschko brothers, where we reached I think 20 million people when they fought.
So I want to build up a huge target group for Ringside Zone.
