Arum says that Pacquiao is making $26 million guaranteed for Bradley fight

By Boxing News - 05/25/2012 - Comments

Image: Arum says that Pacquiao is making $26 million guaranteed for Bradley fightBy Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum is saying Pacquiao will be guaranteed a minimum of $26 million for his June 9th title defense against unbeaten Timothy Bradley at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

That number seems to be kind of hard to believe given that the Pacquiao-Bradley fight isn’t expected to bring in huge pay per view numbers like the recent Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Miguel Cotto fight earlier this month. That fight hauled in a cool 1.5 million buys. Mayweather received a guaranteed $32 million, and his net for the fight is going to be a lot more than that.

So is Arum just bringing up numbers from the top of his head to impress boxing fans or is Pacquiao really going to make that kind of cash for the Bradley fight? I’ve been hearing some different numbers than that, much different. The numbers I’m hearing that Pacquiao will make is $6 million guaranteed with Bradley making slightly less at $5 million. That pales next to the big cash that Mayweather got for the Cotto fight.

Pacquiao has got to hope that boxing fans will suddenly start showing huge interest in his fight against Bradley and want to purchase it in high numbers. I’m not so certain they will because the undercard fights aren’t that great, and the main event only has one big name. Bradley is a great fighter but he doesn’t have a huge fan base yet. He’s still working his way up at this point, and I’d be surprised if this fight breaks 700,000 buys.

To me it’s more along the same lines as Pacquiao’s fight with Joshua Clottey in 2010. That fight came in at 660,000 buys and it seemed like a really poor idea of fight at the time. I have no clue why Arum wanted to match Pacquiao against Clottey other than the fact that Clottey was one of Arum’s Top Rank stable fighters.



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