By Chris Williams: Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach doesn’t see the September 13th rematch between WBA/WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr (46-0, 26 KOs) and Marcos Maidana (35-4, 31 KOs) as selling a lot of tickets for their fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Presumably, Roach also thinks the Mayweather-Maidana 2 fight won’t bring in a lot of pay-per-view buys either on Showtime.
“I’m not picking Maidana because he already knows how to beat him. It makes no sense. It’s not going to sell no tickets,” Roach said.
You can expect the Mayweather-Maidana 2 fight to do close to 1 million buys, if not more than that total. It’s a fight that’s going to do well because it’s set up to do well. They already fought last May in an action packed bout from start to finish. Boxing fans loved the fight, and are looking forward to the rematch a great deal.
Roach needs to be more concerned with the lack of interest in Pacquiao’s November 22nd fight against Chris Algieri in Macao, China. Roach wouldn’t need to mention Mayweather’s name all the time if Pacquiao had taken on a quality fighter from the welterweight division instead of being matched against a little known 140 pounder in Algieri.
In my estimation, I see the Pacquiao-Algieri fight bringing fewer than 400,000 pay-per-view buys on November 22d. I see it being somewhere close to 350,000 buys at best. This was just a really bad decision on Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum’s part in selecting Algieri instead of someone from the welterweight division. Unfortunately for Pacquiao, he had no options available to him.
A lot of the top welterweights are with Al Haymon, and with Arum often doing in house fights involving his own fighters instead of guys from outside his Top Rank stable, they options were limited, just as they were for Pacquiao’a last 6 fights.
That last interesting opponent Pacquiao fought was Miguel Cotto in my view. The fighters that Arum reportedly was picking from for Pacquiao’s November 22nd fight was from this list: Ruslan Provonikov, Mike Alvarado and Algieri. It’s no wonder why they keep mentioning Floyd Mayweather Jr’s name. They need him now more than ever.
Roach says he wants to have Pacquiao fight WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia next, but that’s not going to happen. Garcia is with Al Haymon, so Roach can forget about Garcia. I see Pacquiao’s next fight coming from one of these guys: Alvarado, Provodnikov or Juan Manuel Marquez. Since they’re probably not going to give Marquez a 50-50 purse split, you can pretty much rule him out.
That leaves Alvarado and Provodnikov as Pacquiao’s like next opponent. So we’re looking at fight with very few PPV buys compared to the numbers that Pacquiao used to bring in during his prime years of his career.
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