Checking In on ESPN’s Big Bet on Boxing. (Yes, Boxing.)

One is a listing national sports network desperate for cheap and compelling programming that can help stem a decline in audience and balance out some $24 billion in long-term rights contracts.

The other is a formerly glamorous sport hoping to regain relevance and attract a generation of fans who have never heard of Sugar Ray Leonard or Roberto Duran.

In 2017, that makes them the perfect couple.

ESPN is four months into a four-year deal with the boxing promotion company Top Rank, which handles some of the sport’s top names — Manny Pacquiao, Terence Crawford and Vasyl Lomachenko, among others. The nature of the partnership began taking shape on Dec. 9, when Lomachenko, a heralded up-and-comer, defeated Guillermo Rigondeaux before a capacity crowd at the Theater at Madison Square Garden.

ESPN and Top Rank declined to discuss the terms of the deal, but the amount the network will pay over four years is estimated to be less than the cost of a single “Monday Night Football” game.

The Top Rank deal will bring 18 fights to ESPN’s networks next year, two on ABC (Disney owns both ESPN and ABC) and several more on ESPN Plus, the streaming service ESPN will start in 2018. The deal will aim to alter the economics and visibility of boxing, while giving ESPN dozens of hours of relatively cheap programming.

“It is really repositioning the sport,” said Todd duBoef, the president of Top Rank. “I think it has been siloed.”

Nearly two million people watched the Lomachenko-Rigondeaux fight on ESPN. The undercard featured victories from Olympic medalists and the rising fighters Shakur Stevenson and Michael Conlan. The telecast followed ESPN’s coverage of the Heisman Trophy ceremony, to draft off its audience.

To garner a following, ESPN needs fights like these in the worst way.

ESPN receives $7.54 per month from every pay television subscriber whose system carries the network, according to SNL Kagan, which does media research. That fee accounts for more than half of the company’s revenue. But ESPN’s subscriber base has declined to 87 million households from 100 million in 2012, as people increasingly decide to live without pay television.

While the network remains profitable, overall revenue has declined, squeezing profit margins. Also, ESPN’s audience is tiny for virtually everything except live major sports, dragging down Disney’s stock price.

Locked into the enormous fixed costs of long-term rights contracts, ESPN has undergone two rounds of layoffs this year, shedding about 250 employees, though Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, still believes in the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports.

“We’ve never lost our bullishness about ESPN,” Iger said on a recent investor call. “The brand is strong; the quality of their programming is strong.”

While the agreement with Top Rank is minuscule compared with other broadcast rights deals, so far it has provided ESPN with good value. Last year, for instance, including the playoffs and finals, ESPN paid the N.B.A. roughly $3.40 for each person who watched one of its N.B.A. telecasts. For the Lomachenko-Rigondeaux fight, ESPN paid Top Rank slightly more than a dollar per viewer.

About 100,000 more people watched the Top Rank card than saw the Golden State Warriors defeat the Detroit Pistons on ESPN the night before.

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Of course, betting on boxing in 2017 seems like a fool’s errand. The only fighter most casual sports fans are familiar with just retired. (Hint: His name rhymes with Hayfeather.) The year’s biggest and highest-grossing fight was a farce, featuring a mixed martial arts celebrity who hadn’t boxed in a decade.

And yet, like the infamous de-limbed knight from Monty Python, boxing’s boosters say the sport’s declines are mere flesh wounds.

For three decades the best boxing has been difficult and expensive to watch, with any remotely intriguing fights on either pay-per-view outlets or the premium-fee cable networks HBO and Showtime. With only the worst version of the product shown on widely available channels, how could anybody become enough of a boxing fan to know it was worth paying for in the first place?

Boxing’s other big problem, according to duBoef, is the disconnect between ability and wealth. “Greatness doesn’t equal money,” he said. “Popularity equals money.”

A quarterback who throws six touchdowns a game, even if he has the personality of a brick, will earn a contract worth tens of millions of dollars because wins are worth lots of money in the N.F.L. But a wonderfully talented boxer who can’t connect with fans because of his style, his personality or both — say, Guillermo Rigondeaux — won’t earn anything near that.

Both ESPN and boxing leaders talk of boxing as a series of peaks and valleys, a sport driven by the big event. Boxing can go weeks or months without being noticed by the casual sports fan.

“If we’re really invested in the sport and we believe in the long-term prospects in terms of it coming back to a really significant prominence, it can’t just pop when there is a card on TV,” said Burke Magnus, the ESPN executive who negotiated the deal with Top Rank.

ESPN and Top Rank are pulling levers to make the fights succeed.

When Baker Mayfield’s Heisman Trophy acceptance speech went long, ESPN delayed the start of the first fight scheduled for its telecast. Four minutes after Mayfield finished, Stevenson and Oscar Mendoza were fighting, to keep as much of the Heisman audiences as possible.

ESPN usually falls prey to its partners at the major sports leagues that set the scheduling. The boxing deal is an opportunity to dictate scheduling. Top Rank doesn’t particularly care on which Saturday nights its bouts take place. It happily created a card for after the Heisman ceremony, and future cards are built around the Super Bowl and the N.B.A. All-Star Game.

It will take more than a few high-profile fights to transform boxing. There is still the confusing alphabet soup of sanctioning organizations, and too often fights are marred by baffling judging. But what ESPN and Top Rank can do is smooth out boxing’s valleys by obtaining something that has so far eluded the sport: advertising dollars.

When boxers fight on pay TV and pay-per-view, they are on platforms that aren’t supported by ad dollars. If advertisers place money behind the sport of boxing more generally, perhaps the profiles of all fighters will rise.

Rather than having ESPN sell 30-second commercials and having Top Rank sell sponsorship of the ring stanchions and venue signs, the two will be engaged in a “collaborative process” to sell everything possible. The entertainment and sports agency CAA, which also brokered the deal and represents most of ESPN’s top boxing commentators, will lead the sales process.

Potentially more transformative to the sport than showing the fights is everything else the agreement contains. While little of it has been finalized, ESPN and Top Rank will develop some combination of pre- and postfight shows. There will be “College GameDay”-like boxing shows, and original boxing programming.

Boxers “are very motivated to let cameras into their lives, to let people get invested in them,” ESPN’s Magnus said.

ESPN’s coverage of an individual sport often correlates with the amount of that sport’s rights that it owns. Ask any hockey fan about the difference in ESPN’s coverage of the sport before and after it stopped broadcasting the N.H.L. in 2005.

By signing with ESPN, Top Rank is expecting that boxing — mostly its boxing — will magically appear throughout the vast ESPN universe.

“I believe in getting into the lexicon, Mike Greenberg, on ‘First Take,’ the scroll at the bottom,” duBoef said.

On Dec. 9, ESPN’s president, John Skipper, made his way from the Heisman Trophy ceremony to the Garden in time for the Lomachenko-Rigondeaux main event. James L. Dolan, owner of the Knicks and the Rangers, and Steve Tisch, owner of the Giants, sat nearby. Skipper’s network indirectly pays both men tens of millions of dollars annually.

But on this night, Skipper wasn’t sitting with Dolan and Tisch. He was front and center, with duBoef and Bob Arum, the legendary boxing promoter who founded Top Rank. For one night at least, they were the most important ESPN partners in the room.

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