By Chris Williams: Floyd Mayweather Jr could bring in a purse of $180 million for his fight against the Philippine’s Manny Pacquiao (57-5-2, 38 KOs) on May 2nd, according to Tim Dahlberg. The $180 million will dwarf the $100 million that Pacquiao could get for the fight. That’s a lot of sweet cash Mayweather can make in this fight. It’s like hitting the lottery for one fight. Who knows? Mayweather could wind up facing Pacquiao a second and even a third time if their fight on May 2nd doesn’t turn out too one-sided.
Mayweather is getting the bigger money based on the purse split of 60-40 in his favor, which they agreed to in their contract.
The gate for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight is projected to be $72 million, a number that would shatter the 2013 record of $20 million that Mayweather and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez put up two years ago in 2013.
It’s still unknown what the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight will cost on pay-per-view. They’re going to make an announcement soon, but suffice to say it’s probably going to be $90 to $100 for the fight. I say for the fight, because that’s where the real value is in this card. The undercard doesn’t have any earth-shattering fights, and I don’t expect it to.
Top Rank promoter Bob Arum has his fighter WBO featherweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko facing #1 WBO Gamalier Rodriguez in what shapes up to be a mismatch. Arum is trying to make a star of Lomachenko, but I’m not sure he’s going to be able to do that unless he starts matching him against better opposition than this, or the last opponent that Arum put Lomachenko in with last November. Arum matched him against Chonlatarn Piriyapinyo in what turned out to be a dull 12 round win for Lomachenko.
Mayweather could have pushed for a 70-30 or even an 80-20 purse split, but the negotiations would have gone longer, and Mayweather wanted to get it over with. With Pacquiao’s pay-per-view numbers tanking in the last three years, it’s hard to argue that he deserves a 60-40 purse split. But you can say that Pacquiao deserves a 60-40 purse split based on the PPV numbers he was bringing in from 2009 to 2012.
Those were the best years of Pacquiao’s career in terms of his pay-per-view buys.
The money that Mayweather and Pacquiao will be making for this fight is going to make it difficult for them to resist having a rematch.
If they move on from this fight, then they’ll likely have to take a dramatic pay cut for their next fight unless they face someone popular like Saul “Canelo” Alvarez or Miguel Cotto. The rest of the guys they could fight at 147 or 154 lack the popularity for them to make big money against them.
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