Pacquiao likely to re-sign with Top Rank

By Boxing News - 01/05/2014 - Comments

pac7893487By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum dropped a bomb shell in an interview on Sunday in which he revealed that Manny Pacquiao may re-sign with him when his contract expires at the end of this year. This means that we probably will not get a chance to see Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight.

Mayweather gave Pacquiao the path to get a fight with him when he said that he would never fight Pacquiao while he’s still with Arum. But if Pacquiao is going to re-sign with Arum, does this mean that Pacquiao doesn’t want to fight Mayweather? Is this Pacquiao’s way out of fighting him by signing for another 1-2 years when his current contract expires?

“I just had a good meeting with Michael [Koncz] yesterday, and I’ll leave it at that,” said Arum to RingTV. “I have a contract with Manny, and he’s saying that we may very well renew the contract past 2015.”

Let’s look at this. If Pacquiao re-signs with Arum, he doesn’t get the mega-fight against Mayweather. So that’s a loss of $50 million at least for Pacquiao. Pacquiao doesn’t get Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Amir Khan, Danny Garcia, Lucas Matthysse, Shawn Porter, Devon Alexander, Lamont Peterson, and Adrien Broner. But if he says with Arum, Pacquiao get fights against Arum’s Top Rank stable fighters like Brandon Rios, Ruslan Provodnikov, Terence Crawford, Timothy Bradley, Mike Alvarado and Mikey Garcia. Is it worth it for Pacquiao to fight those guys for the next 2-3 years or is it worth it for him to be free to fight Mayweather, Canelo, Khan and Danny Garcia.

Pacquiao will make money regardless of whether he stays or leaves Top Rank. But the question is does Pacquiao make as much money if he stays with them? We just saw Pacquiao’s fight against Brandon Rios bring in just 475,000 PPV buys. The boxing public spoke and said they weren’t interested in seeing Pacquiao fight Rios. Will the boxing public be interested in seeing Pacquiao fight Alvarado, Rios [in a rematch], Mikey Garcia, Crawford, Bradley and Provodnikov in high numbers? I don’t know, but it looks like we could out if he does choose to stay with Arum rather than testing the waters by letting his contract with Top Rank expire, take a fight with Mayweather, and some of the other fighters that Arum hasn’t been matching him up against outside of Top Rank.



Comments are closed.