Arum says Pacquiao-Clottey will sell as many PPV buys as Pacquiao-Cotto

By Boxing News - 03/09/2010 - Comments

Image: Arum says Pacquiao-Clottey will sell as many PPV buys as Pacquiao-CottoBy Esteban Garduno: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says he thinks that this Saturday’s fight between World Boxing Organization welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao and challenger Joshua Clottey will do as well as the Pacquiao vs. Miguel Cotto bought in terms of pay per view buys, according to an interview of Arum at Boxing Talk. The Pacquiao-Cotto fight sold 1.25 million pay per view buys, which a good portion of it was driven by fan interest in seeing Cotto fight. Arum says that at the least, he sees the Pacquiao vs. Clottey fight doing no worse than 900,000 to 1 million PPV buys.

This is obviously very wishful numbers for a fight that matches Pacquiao, a big star going up against a little known fighter like Clottey. Below, I’ve listed Pacquiao’s biggest fights of his career and shown what his pay per view buys were for each of the fights. You can be the judge of how you think Pacquiao will do against Clottey.

Pacquiao vs. Oscar De La Hoya – 1.25 million PPV buys
Pacquiao vs. Miguel Cotto = 1.25 million PPV buys
Pacquiao vs. Ricky Hatton = 830,000 PPV buys
Pacquiao vs. Juan Manuel Marquez = 400,000 PPV buys
Pacquiao vs. David Diaz = 250,000 PPV buys

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In contrast, here is Floyd Mayweather’s best pay per view numbers:

Mayweather vs. De La Hoya = 2.4 million PPV buys
Mayweather vs. Juan Manuel Marquez = 1.05 million PPV buys
Mayweather vs. Ricky Hatton = 850,000 PPV buys

As you can see, it’s asking a lot of Pacquiao and Clottey to bring in the kinds of numbers that the Pacquiao-Cotto brought in. The reason is Clottey is probably a lot less well known than Hatton and Marquez in the United States. Clottey is probably as about well known to the casual boxing fan as David Diaz is. I still think the Pacquiao-Clottey fight will do better than Pacquiao’s fights against Diaz and Marquez simply because Pacquiao is better known to the boxing public because of his fights against De La Hoya, Cotto, Marquez and Hatton in the past two years.

Pacquiao will draw well in spite of the fact that he’s facing pretty much a nobody on March 13th . However, I think Arum is deluded if he thinks that a fight between Pacquiao and Clottey is going to bring in the same numbers as Pacquiao’s bout against the much better known Cotto.

That’s ridiculous to even consider. Unlike the Pacquiao-Cotto fight, there isn’t going to be an HBO 24/7 Pacquiao-Clottey series. Instead, there was one special, “Road to Dallas”, which showed once on HBO, and had none of the interesting inside information that the usual 24/7 series typically have. Additionally, there appears to be little marketing of the fight by Arum and Top Rank. I’m still not seeing commercial advertisements for the fight even though it’s less than a week away.

Without the fight being marketed to boxing fans that have no idea who Clottey is there’s no way that the Pacquiao-Clottey fight will do as well as Pacquiao’s bouts against Cotto and De La Hoya. That sounds like wishful thinking to me. If anything, I think it might fall into the 800,000 PPV neighborhood. It could reach a million PPV if enough new fans of Pacquiao want to see him fight and don’t care who he fights against. But they have to know about the fight, and with almost zero commercials being played on Cable to alert fans about this fight, I can’t see how they would even know about the fight.



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