Marquez expected to get $13-15 million for Pacquiao 5th fight

By Boxing News - 12/20/2013 - Comments

marquez4356By Chris Williams: 40-year-old Juan Manuel Marquez (55-7-1, 40 KO’s) stands to make between $13-15 million to fight Manny Pacquiao (55-5-2, 38 KO’s) on April 12th, according to Fightnews. Bob Arum of Top Rank wants Marquez as Pacquiao’s opponent for this fight date, and he doesn’t seem ready to take no for an answer.

It’s pretty easy to see why given Pacquiao’s incredibly low pay-per-view numbers for his last fight against Brandon Rios last month. After that disaster, Arum needs a proven PPV money fighter, and the only one he’s got that he can count on to boost Pacquiao to 1 million buys and over is Marquez.

Marquez made a guaranteed $5 million for his last fight against Pacquiao last December, whereas Pacquiao got a got a guaranteed $25 million. If we’re still talking about a purse of $30 million for this fight in guaranteed money, then $15 million doesn’t sound so bad for Marquez as well as he’s able to pull in more with the PPV upside. But if Pacquiao is going to be making $25-30 million to Marquez’s $13-15 million, then Marquez should probably walk away from the deal, because we just saw Pacquiao’s last fight against Rios draw a mere 475,000 PPV buys.

With Pacquiao fighting Marquez, could get expect an additional 600,000 buys at the minimum, and that’s not Pacquiao bringing those fans in. You can bet that those fans wouldn’t be paying for the fight just to see Pacquiao.

They’d be fans of Marquez paying to see him destroy Pacquiao for a 2nd time time and beat arguably for the 5th straight time after having lost twice by controversial decisions and robbed by a draw in his first fight with Manny. A lot of the fans would be paying to see Marquez put Pacquiao out of his misery and sending him into a permanent retirement.

As we saw in Pacquiao’s fight against Rios, he can’t pull in the fans unless he’s got an opponent that can bring in the PPV buys like Marquez. That’s why Marquez deserves nothing short of a 50-50 deal. If he can’t get that then he shouldn’t bother wasting his time, because it’s only fair that he get half when it’s mostly his fans that are making the fight a big deal.

If Arum doesn’t want to give Marquez a 50-50 deal then he can always get Tim Bradley to fight Pacquiao and watch the PPV numbers end up around 500,000 again. I don’t know of too many people want to see that dull recycled fight again. Arum needs to bring in new blood for Pacquiao because trotting out the same guys over and over again like Bradley is incredibly boring. I wouldn’t be so bad if it was on regular HBO or discounted to be a PPV fight with an asking price of $5 instead of $60, but Arum isn’t going to do that. A Bradley-Pacquiao II fight will no doubt go for $55-60, and I think that’s $50 too much for me.



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