Mayweather-Mosley will outsell Pacquiao-Clottey

By Boxing News - 02/18/2010 - Comments

Image: Mayweather-Mosley will outsell Pacquiao-ClotteyBy Edgardo Javier: I can’t help thinking that Manny Pacquiao’s promotional team royally screwed up by picking Joshua Clottey as an opponent for Pacquiao to fight next. Because in doing so, it puts Floyd Mayweather in an excellent position to outsell the Pacquiao-Clottey fight by a significant margin. This is in turn will cause Mayweather to demand a bigger slice of the revenue for a fight against Pacquiao in the future. Mayweather would likely feel justified in doing so if he can point to his better numbers for pay-per-view than Pacquiao.

It probably won’t matter how many backsides that Pacquiao’s promotional team put in seats at the Dallas Cowboy stadium on March 13th, the real money will be coming from pay-per-view buys, and if Mayweather does a lot better than Pacquiao, we likely can forget about a future fight between Mayweather and Pacquiao. Unless Pacquiao was willing to accept a smaller slice of the piece below 50%, which I seriously doubt, then we wouldn’t likely be seeing a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight.

I like Pacquiao and think he’s a great fighter, but he can’t do it alone. He needs a big star opposite him to get the kinds of numbers that will outsell Mayweather-Mosley. The choice of Clottey might have been a great idea at the time that he was selected by Pacquiao’s promotional company Top Rank, because Clottey after all fights for Top Rank as does Pacquiao, meaning that the company wouldn’t have to share the profits for a fight with another company. But they needed someone a little better known than Clottey to bring in the huge numbers that would outdo a Mayweather fight.

Clottey just isn’t well known enough to the casual fans to make him someone that fans think could actually beat him. I’ve spoken to number casual boxing fans that often purchase pay-per-view events involving Pacquiao, and in every case, none of them have heard of Clottey. When I ask them if they think he has a chance against Pacquiao, ever one of them said “no.”

When you have a fighter that few people have ever heard of, it takes a lot of marketing to sell the fight to the public. In this case, there will need to be an HBO 24/7 series to try make the unknowing fans aware of who Clottey. But even that won’t likely be enough to cause people to want to buy the Pacquiao-Clottey fight in the kinds of numbers that Mayweather-Mosley fight will be bringing in.

And that’s really unfortunate if that does take place, because it pretty much will seal the fate of a potential Mayweather-Pacquiao bout down the road. In hindsight, Pacquiao’s team should have dug up a super star or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Having Pacquiao-Clottey jammed down our throats is about as appealing as eating a big plate of spinach and liverwurst.

If you were starving for a fight you might watch it, but it’s not the kind of fight that people will look forward to like the Mayweather-Mosley bout. And it won’t likely do nearly as well as the Mayweather-Mosley fight in terms of pay-per-view buys.



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