Matchroom v Queensberry: who actually wins on the books?

TALE OF THE TAPEThe two camps, side by side

Headline figures from each group's principal entity: Matchroom Holdings and Queensberry Promotions. Both cover financial years ending in 2025. The green marker shows which camp leads each line.

Matchroom Holdings and Matchroom Sport both report the same £225.5m because it is the consolidated group figure; they are not additive. "Revenue per head" divides turnover by the headcount in the lead entity, and reads high for both promoters because purses, venue and broadcast costs flow through the accounts rather than sitting as staff or assets.

QUESTION 01Which of Hearn's sports actually makes the money?

Darts. Split into its operating subsidiaries, Matchroom's boxing arm is the largest by revenue at £68 million, but the Professional Darts Corporation is close behind on £63 million and far more profitable, converting 34% of that into pre-tax profit against boxing's 18%. Snooker adds £41 million but barely breaks even. In profit terms the ranking flips: darts £21.5 million, boxing £12 million, snooker £1.6 million. The promotion the public associates with Hearn is not the one paying the bills.

Turnover   Pre-tax profit  · bars scaled within each measure

QUESTION 02Why did Queensberry's revenue jump 49% in a year?

Because the money changed source. Queensberry's turnover surge to £167 million tracks its alignment from late 2023 with Saudi Arabia's Riyadh Season, which placed Warren's company at the centre of the sport's biggest nights, followed by a move of its UK broadcast rights to an exclusive DAZN deal from April 2025. That is event and rights income flowing through a single trading company. It explains why revenue can leap by half while the balance sheet barely moves: the cash arrives for a card and largely leaves again as purses and production, leaving £6.8 million of net assets behind.

QUESTION 03Who owns these businesses, and what does that reveal?

This is where the two rivals diverge most sharply, and where the accounts alone are misleading. Both remain family-controlled dynasties, each now with the founder's son running the commercial side. But they have taken opposite routes to growth, and it shows up directly in the balance sheets.

The tell: 86% of Matchroom's value is invisible on its own accounts

A business worth more than £1 billion that books £142 million of net assets is telling you where a promoter's value actually lives. At the reported valuation Matchroom trades at roughly seven times its book net assets, about four and a half times revenue, and 27 times pre-tax profit. The gap is the intangible engine: long-term broadcast rights, event IP such as the darts and snooker world championships, and the athlete relationships that never touch the balance sheet. Queensberry is the same phenomenon in a more extreme form, £167 million of activity resting on almost no recorded assets, because its worth is a roster and a set of contracts, not property or cash.

That is the single most useful reason to add ownership data to a promoter analysis. The filed financials can size the trading, but only the ownership filings show who has bought into that intangible value, at what price, and how much control the founding family has kept. For Matchroom the person-with-significant-control record and confirmation statements would confirm the Hearn, Pitch and Bruin split; for Queensberry they would settle whether any of the Saudi or broadcaster money is equity or purely commercial. Until that is pulled, treat the ownership descriptions here as drawn from public announcements rather than from the accounts themselves.

THE LEDGEREvery company in each empire

All 28 entities linked to the two promoters, grouped by camp and ranked by turnover then net assets. Figures in £ millions from the latest filed accounts. Losses and negative balances are shown in red brackets.

Turnover is disclosed for only the larger trading entities; smaller companies file under small or micro-entity exemptions. Many of the listed shells are dormant, holding nil or nominal net assets.

COMMON QUESTIONSMatchroom, Queensberry and the money