By Scott Gilfoid: Former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr says he sees WBA super middleweight champion Carl Froch as a better opponent for him to fight later this year than unbeaten and well-respected WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin in the United States.

Chavez Jr doesn’t say why he sees Froch as a better opponent for him than Golovkin, but he did say that the fight would likely wind up with a lot of pay-per-view buys in the UK.

The British money that the fight can make is obviously something that attracts Chavez Jr to the Froch fight. Whether Froch will let Chavez Jr get a good enough split of the British money is the big question. Chavez Jr also sees the Froch fight being on pay-per-view in the U.S. However, that’s going to be asking a lot of the American boxing fans to pay to see Chavez Jr, a fighter who hasn’t fought a quality opponent in three long years since his one-sided loss to Sergio Martinez in 2012.

Will American boxing fans be willing to dig deep into their pockets to see Chavez Jr fight in 2015? I kind of doubt it. If Chavez Jr was fighting someone like Golovkin, then I could see the fight doing reasonably well on PPV, but I still don’t see it bringing in more than 100,000 pay-per-view buys at best. But a Chavez Jr-Froch fight will likely come in far short of 100K PPV buys in the U.S, due to Froch not being well-known with the casual boxing fans.

“I think that fight happens this year because a lot of people can see this fight,” Chavez Jr said via Fighthype.com. “I think he’s better opponent than Golovkin. I like for the fight to happen here. In the UK it’s a lot of pay-per-views, and in the U.S it’s a lot.”

Chavez Jr vs. Froch might bring in a lot of pay-per-view buys in the UK due to Froch’s popularity alone, but I don’t see Froch or Chavez Jr being popular enough in the United States to sell a lot of PPV buys. Before taking a beating by Sergio Martinez in 2012, Chavez Jr never established himself as a pay-per-view fighter.

Now that Chavez Jr has taken the loss to Martinez and fought only twice in the past three years against middleweight journeyman Brian Vera, I don’t see Chavez Jr having progressed in terms of becoming a more popular fighter or someone who can sell PPV buys. If anything, I think Chavez Jr has regressed badly in the last three years.

That’s why it seems like such a really, really poor choice for Froch to be looking to get a fight against Chavez Jr instead of him going after the likes of Golovkin or Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. Those guys would at least sell some PPV buys.

I still don’t see a Froch-Canelo fight doing more than 300,000 PPV buys in America, but I think it would do three times the numbers that a Froch-Chavez Jr fight would do in the U.S.

If Chavez Jr rates Froch as a better fighter than Golovkin then you have to wonder what he’s been looking at in forming his opinions. Froch isn’t a great defensive fighter, and he gets hit a lot more than Golovkin did. Froch also isn’t unbeaten, and his knockout record is nothing like Golovkin.