Pacquiao vs. Rios: Will fans pay to see Manny lose to Brandon?

By Boxing News - 05/15/2013 - Comments

pac87By Chris Williams: On paper the November 23rd fight between Manny Pacquiao and Brandon Rios in Macau, China isn’t particularly interesting one. Rios just got beat and got a questionable win over Richard Abril last year in February.

In effect, Rios has lost two out of his last three fights if you count his win over Abril as really being a loss as many boxing fans do. And Pacquiao has lost his last two fights and is coming off of a 6th round knockout loss to Juan Manuel Marquez last December.

Under normal circumstances a fight like Pacquiao-Rios would be lucky if it drew 600,000 buys because Rios doesn’t have a large fan base as of yet, and there’s questions about whether he ever will. However, the fight can still draw huge numbers from curious boxing fans wanting to see Pacquiao get knocked out by Rios.

It’s always like that in boxing when you get a long-time established fighter who some fans never really liked to begin with. Once they start losing there’s an immediate interest from fans to see whether they’ll get beaten again in their next fights in the short term.

This interest doesn’t last very long, however, as once a fighter starts getting beaten like an old shoe over and over again, then fans no longer care because it stops being suspenseful or interesting.

I think for this reason the Pacquiao-Rios fight could end up drawing good PPV numbers on November 23rd despite the fact that it really shouldn’t given the poor circumstances of the two fighters.

We’ll never find out what the Pacquiao-Rios PPV numbers are if the fight does poorly, but if it does over 1 million buys then we’ll no doubt be seeing the PPV results released quickly after the fight.

The way that Pacquiao was stopped in his last fight against Marquez, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him get knocked out by Rios in this fight because knockouts like the one Pacquiao suffered often leads to additional knockouts of that type in the future.



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