There is no other way to put it: John Skipper is making an absolute mess of the boxing program at DAZN.

He blew it by not having final say on Canelo Alvarez’s opponents, and in the process he blew a major event for the streaming service in September that would have led to a major influx of new subscribers.

The number of people who watch fights on DAZN matters little in its subscription-based business model. What it needs is for each fight it streams to help boost the subscriber numbers.

More than 90 percent of its fights, no matter how good they turn out to be in the ring, do nothing to sell subscriptions. It’s the fights with the biggest names — Alvarez, Gennadiy Golovkin, Anthony Joshua — that do that.

There are two massive weekends each year on the boxing calendar, the first Saturday in May when there is always a major event in Las Vegas to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. The other is on Mexican Independence Day weekend in September.

The tradition of fighting on those two weekends was begun by Top Rank when it was promoting Oscar De La Hoya. The majority of the largest pay-per-view bouts in history has come on one of those weekends.

View photos DAZN executive chairman John Skipper (L) and CEO James Rushton pose backstage at the launch of the global sports streaming service on July 17, 2018, in New York. (Getty Images) More

Neither Alvarez, who signed a contract with DAZN last year that was in excess of $300 million for 10 fights, nor Golovkin will be fighting on Mexican Independence Day weekend in Las Vegas this year.

That is nothing more than a failing of Skipper’s leadership. When he signed Golovkin to a deal that paid him more than $100 million as he was moving down the backstretch of his career, Skipper failed to get anything in writing to protect DAZN if Alvarez and Golovkin, for whatever reason, didn’t want to fight each other.

Alvarez and Golovkin deeply dislike each other, much of it emanating from Alvarez’s two failed drug tests in 2018. When Alvarez won their rematch on Mexican Independence Day weekend last year, he gained the upper hand and has been flexing his muscle.

He was refusing to fight Golovkin. On Monday, as Skipper desperately sought to salvage the situation, he approved Sergiy Derevyanchenko as a potential opponent for Alvarez. Alvarez also got Skipper to agree, inexplicably, that he wouldn’t have to fight Golovkin on Cinco de Mayo next year.

Alvarez and Golovkin sold over a million pay-per-views in each of their two fights, and the lure of a rubber match on DAZN was why Skipper signed the 36-year-old Golovkin in April to that $100 million-plus deal.

A show headlined by Alvarez-Golovkin III would be the one that would deliver more new subscribers to DAZN than any other.

When DAZN made its U.S. debut last September with a heavyweight title fight between Anthony Joshua and Alexander Povetkin, it promised pay-per-view-caliber events on a regular basis.

But in the 10-plus months it’s aired in the U.S., how many cards has DAZN aired that would have been on HBO Pay-Per-View in the past?

It says here that it’s just one, the May fight between Alvarez and Daniel Jacobs. Other than that, there’s been a lot of very entertaining fights streamed on DAZN, but nothing that would have been remotely close to a pay-per-view card.

That is a massive failing and it falls on the man at the top. Worse is Skipper’s failure to have some sort of protection in his deal with Alvarez to ensure a situation like this wouldn’t occur.

View photos A rubber match between Canelo Alvarez and Gennadiy Golovkin isn't going to happen anytime soon. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken) More

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