For years Canelo Álvarez was hailed as the biggest star of boxing’s post-Floyd Mayweather age. After managing to fill Madison Square Garden to capacity on Saturday night for a wildly violent sparring session with the sacrificial lamb Rocky Fielding, that premise appears beyond dispute.

Álvarez, the youngest of seven brothers who each boxed (once all together on the same card), turned professional at 16. He was still a teenager when he signed a contract with Televisa, the TV network known for telenovelas that is among the most watched in all of Latin America. Televisa built him into a household name with his red hair and matinee-idol good looks if not his still-young body of work. That led many sceptical Mexicans to denigrate him as a media creation or, worse, a fraud.

Play Video 1:21 'I just stood there': Fielding admits tactical error after TKO loss to Canelo – video

To Álvarez’s detractors he will always be the exposed 23-year-old made by Mayweather to appear as if he was stumbling around in the dark trying to find the light switch in their 2013 meeting. Even as he rebuilt admirably from the psychological wreckage of his lone professional setback, there was little about Álvarez that fitted the mould of the archetypal Mexican fistic warrior: from his fair skin and cinnamon-coloured hair to a counter-punching style at odds with the devil-may-care aggression, reckless pressure and machismo embodied by predecessors like Julio César Chávez, Rubén Olivares, Carlos Zárate and Juan Manuel Márquez.

There was also the perception that he was avoiding a match with his longtime middleweight bogeyman Gennady Golovkin, which became the most attractive fight that could be made in boxing after Álvarez won the division’s lineal title from Miguel Cotto in his biggest win to that point.

But Álvarez has continued to develop into one of the finest all-around fighters in the sport, breaking his opponents down with an uncommon blend of power, patience, poise and exquisite technique. When he finally took on Golovkin last year and was fortunate to come away with a split draw, Álvarez changed tactics dramatically in the rematch and went toe to toe in the centre of the ring with one of the sport’s most feared punchers, relying on adaptability and resolve to earn a signature win in a classic encounter.

Canelo Álvarez pours it on in three-round destruction of Rocky Fielding Read more

Now squarely in the prime of a Hall of Fame career that has included world titles in three weight classes, the 28-year-old Álvarez is threatening to disrupt the financial model that has governed the sport for nearly five decades.

There was nothing about Saturday’s three-round destruction of the overmatched Fielding to dispel Álvarez’s reputation as a child of privilege. In the end, the gratuitous display was little more than an eight-minute infomercial for DAZN, the upstart subscription streaming service that signed Álvarez to a five-year, 11-fight deal worth a minimum of $365m, a pact that’s been touted breathlessly as the richest athlete contract in sports history.

DAZN is gambling that Álvarez is big enough a draw to convince everyone who signed up for a free, one-month subscription for Saturday’s fight to stay on for US$9.99 a month. But whether it will exist as a streaming service for boxing nerds or blossom into the Netflix of sports will depend almost entirely on whether DAZN can reach beyond the sport’s core audience into the broader realm of casual fans.

Which explains how Álvarez found himself making his New York debut on Saturday in a showcase fight against a hand-picked opponent that often felt more like a promotional appearance and brand-building exercise than a legitimate world-title contest. Fighting eastwards of Texas for only the second time ever – the first was a 2008 scrap at the Miccosukee Indian Gaming Resort on the western outskirts of Miami – Álvarez’s objective was less Fielding’s second-tier WBA title, which allowed promoters to dress up the affair as a meaningful bid for history, and more the expansion of his commercial footprint.

Which is all fine if it means good fights are ahead. Until then, let’s wait and see.