By Chris Williams: WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley (31-0, 12 KO’s) will get a slight bump up in pay for his fight against Manny Pacquiao (55-5-2, 38 KO’s) from the $5 million that he fought Pacquiao for in 2012 to $6 million for his fight this Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Pacquiao is taking a considerable pay cut from the $26 million that he got for the first Bradley fight to $20 million for his rematch with him on Saturday.
They’re not saying why Pacquiao is taking a cut in pay, but it certainly can’t be due to the undercard costing a fortune because there’s not much there in terms of well-known fighters. What it likely means is that due to Pacquiao’s low pay-per-view totals in his last fight against Brandon Rios, which drew only 475,000 PPV buys, their estimating that the interest might not be high enough for Pacquiao to get a huge payday. As low as the numbers were for the Rios fight, you can’t assume that Pacquiao-Bradley 2 fight will do better than 500,000 buys.
There has been rumors that ticket sales for this Saturday’s fight has been underwhelming. It’s not surprising because it’s not a really compelling fight. It’s interesting, but it’s not nearly as interesting as it would have been had Pacquiao not been knocked out cold by Juan Manuel Marquez in 2012. That knockout takes away from this fight, especially when Pacquiao hasn’t faced a good opponent since then. In his last fight, he beat former lightweight champion Rios, who was coming off of a loss to Mike Alvarado.
The match-ups for Pacquiao aren’t interesting, and his promoter Bob Arum has played out the Pacquiao-Marquez fight to death by putting them in with each other over and over again to the point where it’s become forlorn.
It’ll be interesting to see if Pacquiao’s paydays continue to drop after this fight. I wouldn’t be surprised at all. If he loses the fight then you’re likely going to see him take another payday. The only way I see Pacquiao getting his money back to where it was before is if he faces someone like Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Pacquiao could also make a lot of money if he left Top Rank and fought guys like Amir Khan, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Erislandy Lara, Gennady Golovkin, Sergio Martinez, Peter Quillin, Lucas Matthysse, Keith Thurman, Adrien Broner and Danny Garcia. It’s too bad that we’ll probably never see him fight any of them.
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