Barry Hearn: "Being good at something is essential, but being famous is actually more important"

NICK FRIEND - EXCLUSIVE: Few understand the combination of sport and entertainment quite like Hearn. As English cricket looks to expand its audience, the Matchroom founder discusses The Hundred, T20 success, the importance of fame and ‘casual fans’

Barry Hearn leans forward and places a hand on his desk. Talk has turned to T20 cricket.

“The one that got away,” he jokes of a format – and a commercial behemoth – whose combination of sport and entertainment has all the hallmarks of one of his own productions.

Behind his left shoulder, an image of Anthony Joshua – Hearn's latest star name – stares into the room, his arms draped in belts. Further over, Muhammad Ali's shorts hang from a wall.

In decades to come, history will reflect on the 71-year-old, still overseeing business at Matchroom Sport, the sports promotion giant he founded in 1982, as one of the savviest minds to set foot in the industry.

Before Joshua, there was Phil Taylor. Before Taylor, there was Steve Davis. He has taken darts, quite literally, from pub to palace; his son, Eddie, has normalised big-stadia boxing. His leadership of World Snooker has revolutionised the sport.

A self-confessed cricket tragic since he came to obsess with the game almost 60 years ago, Hearn is extraordinary company; his first answer – and this is no exaggeration – is a 31-minute, 4,037-word monologue on the roots of his affinity for the sport, littered with recollections of milestones, catches, notable wickets and names of old teammates.

An opening bowler in his own heyday and now president of his local club, he has shared the field – at various points – with Jon Snow, Graeme Pollock and Sir Richard Hadlee. On his Lord’s Taverners debut, he stood in a slip cordon with Brian Close, snooker great Davis and wrestling’s Mick McManus. There is an anecdote for every day of the week.

“As a dad, there’s nothing like walking out to the crease to open the batting with your son,” he reminisces with a chuckle as he plucks one memory from his anthology. “The first time Eddie and I did, they had a fast West Indian guy bowling. I said: ‘I’ll take number one, son,’ because he was about 14 or 15 at the time. I played out the first over and Eddie walked down the crease and said [to me]: ‘You know you’re shit, don’t you?’”

We talk for well over an hour in his spacious office; for the most part, it is an education: an education in the importance of fame in today’s market; an education in the importance of reaching out to new audiences; an education in the importance of growing a sport from its deepest roots. At times, this is an exclusive lecture in sport business.

Hearn touches on the global success of T20 and explains his stance on The Hundred: watching on as an intrigued outsider, he is unsure of whether it will prove successful and admits he would have approached it differently – perhaps developing the existing Blast competition into a two-tier T20 championship. But, as those who know of his work can attest, he will never criticise innovation.

“Sometimes, you can go to the well with a new idea once too often,” he warns. “T20 was a new idea and that worked. It’s a bit like boxing. We used to have one champion at one weight; now we’ve got four or five at each weight. The next one that comes in, it’s overkill.

“I really hope The Hundred is a massive success. I think it’s an overkill in terms of confusing people – it will take three to five years before we find out if it is a success. We may have an initial spurt out of curiosity. Then, it comes back to: ‘Do I want to spend my money on that or do I want to watch that instead of something else?’ It’s as simple as that.

“The results will be crystal clear because we don’t live in a world of secrets. You will know what the TV ratings are, you will see with your own eyes what the crowds are, the players will tell you whether they’re being paid enough or not. If it ticks boxes, it will have been a resounding success. It may not cure the long-term problem of cricket.”

He is speaking with his conservative commercial hat on. When he first took over as chairman of the Professional Darts Corporation, he had never expected it to become the animal into which it has developed. Likewise, he scoffed when his son, Eddie, first suggested taking George Groves’ fight against Carl Froch to Wembley; 80,000 would later flock to the stadium for the occasion.

“I thought T20 had potential,” he adds. “It just shows you – right place, right time. That was the right thing for cricket to do at that time.

“There were lots of old anoraks saying: ‘You’ll never build a Test match team on this, you know.’ Well no, we’re not trying to build a Test match team – we’re trying to get across to the masses in a different way.”

^{Ben Stokes, Hearn believes, has reached a 'household' level of fame and marketability}

There is a great deal of pertinence in sitting down with Hearn at this juncture. The PDC World Darts Championship has just come to an end, where Fallon Sherrock made history as the first woman to beat a man in the competition. More than five million people have watched the viral clip of her first-round victory moment. Earlier in December, Joshua reclaimed his heavyweight world titles from Andy Ruiz Jr in Saudi Arabia.

For English cricket, of course, there has never been a year so significant; Ben Stokes made himself a household name, while England’s men joined the women’s team in becoming world champions, doing so in a free-to-air final of unrivalled drama. Stokes – and Eoin Morgan’s side – completed a rare BBC Sports Personality treble to crown it all. It is a chance that the game must take, a moment it must exploit.

“When you look at the England cricket team, you’ve got some big characters in there,” Hearn says.

“You’ve also got a lot of people that people don’t know, faces they don’t recognise. If you get the England cricket team walking down Brentwood High Street, how many of them would sign an autograph before they got to the end?”

The answer? Not enough. “That is their biggest mistake,” he counters.

“Being good at something is essential, of course, but being famous is actually more important these days in today’s world, especially among the younger market.”

Hearn laughs. He knows that this sounds like a cynical take, but it is hard to argue with its logic in modern society. Even days later, it is a line that has stuck with me. Perhaps it is a sad indictment on our world but, rightly or wrongly, celebrity counts.

He points to November’s boxing match between YouTubers KSI and Logan Paul. It was promoted by Matchroom, though Hearn didn’t go and didn’t watch. It was criticised in many quarters as a farce, an affront to the sport and professional athletes. The fight was never built for purists of his age, but for an entirely different demographic. In a sense, the concept has its parallels with The Hundred.

“It hit numbers off the fucking park,” Hearn announces, smiling from the edge of his chair. Many of those who paid to watch the fight were not boxing fans, but loyalists to the two influencers involved.

“Some of those people have stayed as subscribers to watch other boxing. The educational process is that you can utilise a new base market and if you do it over and over again and, each time, 10 per cent of that new market stays, you’ve created another market.”

Growth, in a nutshell. He has seen similar through his son’s notoriety on social media. The ‘No Context Hearn’ Twitter account has more than 300,000 followers – it simply tweets videos of Eddie Hearn, who runs Matchroom’s boxing arm. It has grown his status which, in the crowded sporting world, can only be a good thing.

“We research how many of those No Context Hearn people are boxing fans. And the answer is very very few of them,” he adds. That is a positive, by the way; it has widened the reach of Brand Hearn beyond the previous norm. Eddie is more famous than most boxers and, by consequence, Matchroom do much of their event promotion through his Twitter profile.

"Cricket should also be spending more time looking at their superstars and making sure that they are more recognisable to the general public"

There is a wider point to this; fame – and the makings of it – have changed. With cricket for the most part having lived behind a paywall in recent years, making household names of its players has become a more difficult task. It is an arbitrary measurement but, for some context, Eddie Hearn has more Twitter followers than any of England’s World Cup-winning squad.

“Cricket should also be spending more time looking at their superstars and making sure that they are more recognisable to the general public,” Hearn Snr explains.

“You have just got to imagine that it’s a soap opera – a soap opera built around characters. Ben Stokes is probably marginally more famous for his cricket, but it wasn’t so long ago that he was much more famous for having a punch-up on a street. That’s not such a bad thing, being totally cynical about it.

“Stokes’ innings [at Headingley] is, to my mind, one of the greatest innings I’ve ever seen. You’ve got to be able to play, but you’ve got to be a character.

“Alex Higgins was a pain in the arse, but everyone bought a ticket to go and watch him play. And he played at a very high standard. You have to do the two.

“At the moment in the England team, you’ve got four, five or six of them who are becoming household names. One or two of them are household names – outside of the world of cricket. That’s what you aim to do.

“To give you a vibrant sport going forward, it’s about opportunities; it’s about facilities; but it’s about being famous. Take Ben Stokes – he can probably walk down the street, and everyone would say: ‘God, it’s Ben Stokes.’ Now, I could probably think of three or four other cricketers who played in the last Test match that would be a stranger in their own living room, and that’s not good.

“When I was doing boxing on ITV, if I didn’t get 10 million viewers on a Saturday night, I was disappointed. Today [on pay-per-view], leaving out Joshua perhaps, if I get half a million, I’m over the moon. Sheer mathematics tells you it’s difficult to make someone famous if I have to do 20 of those shows to get the same audience as one on the network.”

^{The mascot race at T20 Blast Finals Day has become an annual staple of an iconic occasion in the domestic calendar}

There is a natural segway here to the summer’s World Cup final. Before England’s semi-final, it was announced that – should the home nation reach the finale – it would be shown on free-to-air platforms as well as on Sky, with Channel 4 simulcasting the game. It marked England’s first appearance away from a paywall since 2005; that 14-year period has coincided with a drop-off in participation levels.

It is, of course, more complicated than this. Colin Graves and Tom Harrison have been at pains to explain in recent times the financial implications of simply handing a Test each year to terrestrial television, though the new broadcast deal will see some live cricket returning to the BBC. And Sky have also proven fine custodians and supporters of the game.

Hearn, himself, is keen to stress this complexity. “We’re all grateful for TV money because without it, we don’t have a sport,” he says bluntly. For all the romanticism of a return to free-to-air television, this is a harsh truth. “Everything we learn comes from America on TV,” he adds. The next movement, he reckons, could see a shift towards sport-specific subscriptions.

“The greatest thing they did was giving away the final of the World Cup,” he suggests of England’s summer. “That was a smart move by Sky. It was also a smart move by cricket.

“If you can reach the entire population of this country and tell them something about cricket, even if a very small percentage of them listen and follow up, it’s a massive plus.”

Enter, the ‘casual fan’. Gold dust. Hearn refers back to the concept repeatedly; it has become central to Joshua and, indeed, a bedrock to the ever-growing popularity of the PDC. Sherrock's landmark success in December made headlines worldwide and further expanded the game's fanbase. Thousands took to social media to tell the world that they were watching because of her, rather than the sport itself: the ‘casual fan’ personified.

“Today’s market is about entertainment,” Hearn grins. The need to appeal to a greater audience has led him down this path; in a commercial universe, it is why he can understand the intentions of The Hundred, for example, and it is also why he so respects the impact had by T20 on the sport.

“Darts is a massive party with world-class sport going on at the same time. That makes it quite unique,” he states.

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That the two can coexist together has often been among the sticking points for those who doubt the game’s legitimacy – a jamboree of top-level sport, all with a backdrop of booze, singing and dancing.

“And T20 is a bit like that as well. It is a party atmosphere and people are leaving with a smile on their faces, win or lose, because they’ve had a good night.

“It’s not the normal case of: ‘We’re Essex and we’ve got to beat Yorkshire.’ With that sort of contest, you don’t actually hate either of them. You actually appreciate their talent. One of them is going to win, but that’s all right, because you’re having a good time at the same time.

“We live in a world where there’s all sorts of problems everywhere. We want to create something where, when you go in there and as you walk through the door, you don’t have another thought. No pressures. Park everything outside the door.

“There’s no reason why you can’t try to deliver more than just the sport.”

In his foreword for Freddie Wilde and Tim Wigmore's T20-focused book, Cricket 2.0, Indian journalist Harsha Bhogle described T20 as ‘a festival with cricket at its core’.

There is a clear crossover between a raucous evening at Alexandra Palace and an afternoon in Edgbaston’s Hollies Stand on T20 Blast Finals Day. It is not only the beer-soaked enthusiasm and hoards of fancy dress, but that both have retained their popularity, even with the passing of time.

Blast Finals Day tickets for 2020 have already sold out, while the PDC sold 80,000 for the World Championship on the first day of sales.

The secret? “You try to make something unique and something memorable,” Hearn explains. “The most important thing is in creating something for people to talk about the following day at work. We always start off with that – what customer experience is going to be there?

“Now, it goes without saying that the sporting side has to be excellence. Whilst two donkeys make a great race, it doesn’t have any duration in terms of appeal if it’s a poor standard, because we judge it by other things we see on TV or by things other people tell us about. We have to get the excellence right, which isn’t so much a problem.

“Then, you have to reward those people. The fact that you have to reward them puts the pressure on you to commercialise. To commercialise, you have to make sure that the customers get value for money and enjoy themselves and want to come back and want to tell their friends what a great night they had.”

If T20 is a product of that concept, then Blast Finals Day feels like an occasion unto itself; Mr Motivator performed a dance routine between games in September, while renditions of Sweet Caroline and mascot races have become staples of an iconic date in the cricketing calendar. It has acheived the kind of cult status of excellence and experience to which the ‘casual fan’ prescibes.

Then, consider Joshua; among the top fighters in the heavyweight division, his greatest achievement to date may well have come in his ability to consistently sell out enormous arenas. If Joshua is a boxer, then AJ is a brand. Could traditional boxing fans consistently fill Wembley? Doubtful.

The same is true of the darting empire built by Hearn; the major competitions attract event-goers as much as the game’s purists. It is a sport of characters – some manufactured, others natural.

Snooker, too. “You’ve got to spend time building the character, building a persona,” Hearn says. “Some of them are hard; I managed to build a character out of Steve Davis, who at the time was the most boring person in the world. I made a point of building him as the world’s most boring person. And it worked.”

"You want to give ‘proper’ fans their due respect for the fact they’ve been so passionate about the game over time, the fact they’ve been so loyal to the game. You have to acknowledge that to an extent"

The PDC holds media classes for its players, giving them nicknames and walk-on music. Rules have been bent to encourage individuality; Peter Wright, the newly crowned world champion, was given special permission to wear multi-coloured trousers.

“One of them came up and said: ‘I used to be a baker. Is it all right if I walk on with a hat on and give out cakes to the crowd as I walk in?’ I went: ‘Fucking brilliant, son. Do it every day.’ And then he develops this persona. Suddenly, he’s created a brand value for himself and that’s what it’s all about.”

Bakery, of course, is an extreme and hardly transferable to cricket. The notion of individuality, however, absolutely is. The gist is simple: fame is crucial for capturing the attention of the ‘casual fan’, and individuality – as much as ability – breeds that prominence.

It is an approach that has, at times, put Hearn at loggerheads with those who might view themselves as ‘proper fans’. He dislikes the term and resents the idea of playing off ‘proper’ and ‘casual’ supporters against one another. “If we said you can’t go in unless you’ve scored a hundred or taken a hat-trick, we wouldn’t have anyone in the crowd.”

Does he fear alienating his existing group of lifelong followers? “No, because they’re in love with the game. You’ve got them anyway. But I don’t want to take advantage of anyone because complacency in any relationship is dangerous.

“What you’ve got to do is find the people who don’t love the game, and make your market bigger.

“You want to give ‘proper’ fans their due respect for the fact they’ve been so passionate about the game over time, the fact they’ve been so loyal to the game. You have to acknowledge that to an extent.

“But you have to spread your appeal programme far wider. Everything is about percentages; if I can get one per cent of China watching my TV programmes, I’m happy. I’d like to make it five per cent, I’d like to make it 10. I’m constantly trying to do that. But the only way I’ll do that is by spreading it outside the normal zone. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with what we’ve always had.

“The danger for cricket is that the participation market becomes targeted to a more affluent background, which doesn't alienate but also doesn't endure the other side of the market that you're trying to attract as the casual fan. This is where someone like Stokesy is such a big character.”

^{Hearn (right) stands alongside Peter Wright (centre), the winner of the 2020 World Darts Championship}

When you listen to Hearn – and it is hard not to be engrossed, there is a common denominator to many of his thoughts: grassroots – the foundation, quite literally, of a healthy sport. In short, the present is important, but the future is vital. And the latter depends on the former.

For indoor sports like darts, boxing and snooker, barriers to entry are minimal; the equipment is cheap, membership fees are no issue and little space is required.

He reaffirms his belief that cricket remains in a strong position, but the closure of several amateur clubs, paywalls and a private school dominance have complicated the route into the game for many. Every leisure centre, he says, should have a cricket section. Few do.

“There’s a career line [in darts] which – as it should be in all sports – just depends on ability,” he explains. “It should be a meritocracy. But you have to get them in first.

“Nobody has the divine right to be successful in sport: it’s about God-given ability, dedication, application. But to do that, you have to give them the opportunity.

“The problem for cricket is the grassroots of cricket. Where do we end up in 10 years’ time or 20 years’ time?”

He picks out golf as an example, where participation levels are also falling and several clubs have disappeared in recent times.

“And yet, the Ryder Cup, the US Open, the Open are bigger and bigger and bigger,” he points out, highlighting the ‘casual fandom’ attached to those marquee events. “Tennis the same. Wimbledon is massive. But who’s actually playing it?

“The numbers are in freefall. Kids today won’t spend the time. They don’t turn up at a cricket ground and say: ‘Can I have a game today?’

“Barriers for entry have to be removed. If you don’t do it, your audience starts to drop away.”

"We live at a time where if you win the Ashes, you’re immediately invited to No.10 Downing Street. I wouldn’t go. I would say, don’t pay lip-service to my sport. Do something about the fundamentals of my sport"

The Mosconi Cup was created by Matchroom and has become the Ryder Cup of pool, so to speak. Its success as a commercial entity heightens the disconnect that he describes. “It sells out massive,” Hearn says, “but not too many people are playing nine-ball pool in the UK.

“Eventually, that will implode on your commercial assets because where kids still kick a football, that is its greatest asset. You don’t actually sell that, but the fact that that exists is why you’re there and why you will be a sustainable business.”

He adds: “When you look at the grassroots, there’s no point in taking the flower off a tulip because you should be looking at the roots of the tulip; we’re not doing enough of that.

“I have no doubt that there are people that were born to play cricket that are not playing because they don’t have the opportunity.”

This, he believes, is far more a governmental responsibility than that of any sporting body. Hearn grew up on a Dagenham council estate and he understands better than most the challenges faced by youngsters for whom cricket is not a natural option.

He only stumbled across the game after being persuaded by his mother to attend a coaching session being put on at Buckhurst Hill Cricket Club. It is no longer that straightforward, not least because of the other options available to this generation of young people.

As far as Hearn is concerned, the national defence budget should be matched by what is spent on sport. He believes that the two are inextricably linked: sport, he suggests, gives the country the character that its defence budget fights to protect.

It leads him to a final thought.

“We live at a time where if you win the Ashes, you’re immediately invited to No.10 Downing Street,” he states.

“I wouldn’t go. I would say, don’t pay lip-service to my sport. Do something about the fundamentals of my sport. Everyone wants their picture taken with you when you win. I want to have your picture taken when you create opportunity.”

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