Max Kellerman used his Game Over podcast to fire back at boxing promoters Eddie Hearn and Oscar De La Hoya, delivering a lengthy defense of Zuffa Boxing and warning both men that their resistance to the new venture is a fight they have already lost.
Kellerman, who serves as an analyst on Zuffa Boxing’s broadcast team alongside Joe Tessitore and Andre Ward, said Hearn and De La Hoya had been publicly criticizing Zuffa and targeting him by name — and he had heard enough.
“They have been going at Zuffa and mentioning me by name,” Kellerman said on the podcast. “They have been going after Zuffa and talking wild about me.”
The Conor Benn Signing Was the Breaking Point
The rant was triggered in part by the recent signing of British welterweight Conor Benn to a reported one-fight, $15 million deal with Zuffa — a move that came shortly after Hearn had been publicly dismissive of the promotion. Kellerman made no effort to hide the irony.
“One day after Eddie Hearn was talking wild, one of his big fighters, Conor Benn, signed with Zuffa,” Kellerman said. “And literally the next day after he’s talking all this stuff about Zuffa is nothing, the next day he’s literally choking back tears.”
Hearn confirmed the sting of the loss in an interview with iFL TV, saying he was “pretty devastated” and that the move was “very surprising” and “very, very painful.” Kellerman had little sympathy.
“You can’t talk wild on a Monday and be crying on a Tuesday,” he said. “Don’t talk a mess on a Monday and cry on a Tuesday when you take a loss.”
A History Lesson on Boxing and Broadcast
From there, Kellerman built what amounted to a sweeping historical argument for why Zuffa’s arrival is not just significant — but inevitable.
His case: boxing has expanded alongside every major shift in media. The printing press brought boxing to newspapers. Radio filled its airwaves with fights. Television brought the sport to millions. Each time a new broadcast medium emerged, boxing rode it to wider audiences.
Then came cable, and the dynamic flipped. Boxing became more niche, not less. Premium pay cable — most notably HBO — gave the sport a prestige platform but pushed it further from the mainstream. The business model shifted accordingly.
“Who are the hardcore fans? Let’s milk them for everything they have,” Kellerman said, describing how boxing’s power brokers responded to their shrinking audience. “That’s the business model.”
The result, he argued, was a sport that collapsed in on itself — an explosion of sanctioning bodies, invented weight divisions, and championship belts so numerous that nobody knows who the real champion is in any given division.
“No one knows who the champion is,” Kellerman said. “Sometimes a so-called champion of a sanctioning body is really the eighth best fighter in the division.”
The endgame of that spiral, he said, was boxing disappearing from U.S. broadcast television entirely — something he called unprecedented in the sport’s history.
“For the first time ever, before Zuffa Boxing got on the air, boxing was completely off broadcast TV in the United States,” Kellerman said. “None of the big streamers, no one had boxing in the US. You can’t find boxing on TV for the first time ever. That’s how pushed to the margins it became.”
Streaming Is the Next Wave — and Zuffa Is Riding It
Kellerman’s argument culminated with streaming as the logical next step in the broadcast expansion cycle — and Zuffa, in his view, as the entity smart enough to recognize it.
“That bill that you pay for streaming, for almost everyone nowadays, is like your electric bill or your water bill,” he said. “It’s a utility. Netflix has literally hundreds of millions of subscribers — you’re approaching half a billion subscribers.”
With boxing now back on growing streaming platforms, Kellerman said Hearn and De La Hoya are protecting a status quo that was never good for the sport or its fans to begin with. And rather than adapt, they are lashing out.
“Zuffa steps in and says this status quo that has been benefiting a few promoters and a few fighters, but really has marginalized boxing — that’s not working. Here’s the new game,” he said. “What they haven’t understood is the game is already over. They just don’t know it.”
His advice to both men was blunt:
“A rising tide lifts all boats. Don’t flail around and have your boat sink. Get with the program.”
The Problem With Taking Kellerman at His Word
It is worth noting that Kellerman himself acknowledged his stake in the outcome, introducing the topic on the same episode by saying Zuffa Boxing is a venture “which I’m a part of.” That caveat matters.
Since joining Zuffa’s broadcast team, Kellerman has drawn sharp criticism from across boxing media — criticism that is difficult to dismiss, and that cuts directly at the credibility of the argument he is now making.
Ariel Helwani, who has cited Kellerman as a career inspiration, was direct in his assessment after Zuffa’s debut broadcast. “Max Kellerman was the biggest truth-teller in boxing,” Helwani said. “He weeded through all the BS. He never showed any kind of bias toward any promoter.” The broadcaster Helwani saw on that debut, he said, felt like a different person — one “more concerned with pleasing the people who hired him than serving the audience that once trusted him.” Helwani described the performance as “over the top” and, in a word he did not walk back, “unlistenable.”
Helwani specifically pointed to Kellerman’s habit of working references to TKO, Dana White, and Nick Khan into the broadcast — people, Helwani noted, that Kellerman has close personal relationships with. “There’s a way to hype it up without shilling and going over the top,” Helwani said.
De La Hoya has been less measured. In a recent shot at both Kellerman and Zuffa, De La Hoya declared that “The Ring brand is officially dead with Zuffa tied to its ballsack, drowning at the bottom of Lake Erie, next to Max Kellerman’s career.”
That kind of criticism has followed Kellerman throughout Zuffa’s early run. He has been widely accused of abandoning objectivity in favor of promotion, drawing particular scrutiny for comparing unproven Zuffa fighters to all-time greats during broadcasts.
The tension is real. The historical argument Kellerman laid out on Game Over is, on its face, a coherent one — and not obviously wrong. But it is being made by a man on the payroll of the company he is defending, about competitors who are directly threatening that company’s business. Whether his argument carries the weight it once would have from the sport’s foremost truth-teller is a question only the audience can answer.
A War of Words With No End in Sight
Hearn, meanwhile, has not gone quietly. He recently dismissed Zuffa’s vision altogether, questioning what the promotion actually stands for beyond “control” — and mispronouncing the company’s name in the process.
With Benn now signed, the promoter wars show no signs of cooling. Zuffa is building its roster and expanding its footprint. Hearn and De La Hoya are pushing back harder. And Kellerman is in the middle of all of it — no longer just a commentator, but a combatant.
Whether the game is truly over for boxing’s old guard remains to be seen. But the fight is very much on.
