By Allan Fox: With only six weeks to go before the huge mega-fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao, there is still no pay-per-view price for the fight.
You would expect that there would have been an announcement by this point so that the public would know what kind of price tag they’ll be expected to pay out. There’s been unofficial talk that the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will go for $90-100 on PPV, but still nothing official.
It’s unclear whether the organizers for the fight are having second thoughts about selling the fight for too much. If they ask for $90 to $100, they’ll be perceived as greedy in the eyes of some boxing fans, because in a case like this there’s going to be a huge amount of people interested in purchasing the fight.
There is no limitations so it’s not as if they’ll run out of the ability to sell the fight on PPV. It’s not as these are tickets for a limited capacity arena. If they sell the fight for $60 to $70, they’ll have a better chance of getting more people to purchase the fight than they would if they sell it for more.
What they don’t need is to permanently turn off fans by asking for too much money. If they’re perceived as being greedy, they could lose fans, and that’s not a good thing.
Mayweather, Pacquiao and pay-per-view people are going to make a huge amount of money on the fight regardless of what price tag they put on it for PPV. It doesn’t see like it’s really necessary to ask the boxing public to pay more for the fight. If it was only going to be a small amount of fans purchasing it, then it would make sense to sell it for more. But with this fight likely to break the pay-per-view record of 2.4 million set by the Mayweather vs. Oscar De La Hoya fight, it would seem like a smarter thing to do for them to sell it for the same price that they’ve been for the other PPV fights.
It’s a delicate balance. They can ask for more money for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight at the risk of turning away a lot of boxing fans, who might see it as a greedy money grab. On the flipside, they can either sell it for the same price they’ve been selling it, or drop the price down to the $55 area. It’s not likely that they’ll lower the price, and it’s also not likely that they’ll sell the fight for less than $90.
The televised portion of the undercard for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight is still not certain at this point. Top Rank will have WBO featherweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko defending his title against Gamalier Rodriguez. Super middleweights Jesse Hart and Mike Jimenez will be fighting, but that fight isn’t likely to be televised on the PPV portion of the fight. The undercard needs some good fights because Lomachenko-Rodriguez is not a good fight. It’s a mismatch. I don’t think casual boxing fans have heard of Hart or Jimenez.
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