By Eric Thomas: The Manny Pacquiao vs. Juan Manuel Marquez 4 fight card has reportedly sold out the 16,000 seat MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, for Saturday’s mega fight card. The live gate is $10.5 million, and Bob Arum of Top Rank is incredibly pleased with the success thus far. It’s a big deal when you sell out the MGM and that usually equates to big pay per view numbers. Pacquiao is expected to get close to $30 million for the fight, and Marquez could bring in near $10 million. He’s got a guaranteed $3 million.

Tomorrow night’s fight card is expected to bring in 1 million PPV buys minimum, possibly as much the November, 2011 PPV totals for the third Marquez-Pacquiao fight, which brought in 1.3 million buys.

You can bet that if the Pacquiao-Marquez 4 PPV figures total 1 million buys or more, we’re going to be seeing Pacquiao vs. Marquez 5 in the second half of 2013, after Pacquiao fights Arum’s stable fighter Brandon Rios on April 20th. The only thing that could trip Arum up for his future plans is if Pacquiao gets badly beaten by Marquez tomorrow night. If that happens, Rios will have to wait and we’ll see the Marquez-Pacquiao 5 bout next April instead of later in the year.

Arum has no real need to put Pacquiao in with guys like Floyd Mayweather Jr, Robert Guerrero, Saul Alvarez or Adrien Broner. If boxing fans are willing to pay big money, in this case $59.99 on PPV, on PPV to see Pacquiao fight Marquez over and over again, then Arum doesn’t need to do anything else. He can keep matching them together until the boxing public finally gets sick of it or the fighters themselves decide they’ve had enough of tearing each other apart.

It’s unclear how much longer Pacquiao can keep fighting at a high level. He wants to fight another three years, but when you look at how much he’s deteriorated in the last three years since his win over Miguel Cotto in 2009, it’s pretty unsettling. He’s slipped dramatically. The 81-year-old Arum obviously wants to ride that Pacquiao train for as long as he can, but he may not be able to stay on top for too much longer.