De La Hoya: Cotto-Canelo could hit 2 million mark on PPV

By Boxing News - 08/31/2015 - Comments

Image: De La Hoya: Cotto-Canelo could hit 2 million mark on PPVBy Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya thinks that the mega-clash between WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) and Golden Boy fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) could wind up bringing in more PPV buys than the September 18th, 1999 fight between De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad.

That fight brought in 1.4 million PPV buys. However, Canelo believes that the Cotto vs. Canelo fight can bring in 2 million PPV buys on HBO, which would make it the 4th highest PPV fight in history.

The highest PPV fights are as follows:

Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao 4.4 million PPV buys
Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Oscar De La Hoya 2.4 million buys
Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez 2.2 million PPV buys
Evander Holyfield vs. Mike Tyson II 1.990 million PPV buys
Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson 1.970 million PPV buys

“This is going to be a success. Look at the people, look at the cameras, everybody’s excited,” De La Hoya said via Fighthype. “This has the ingredients to surpass De La Hoya vs. Trinidad; to hit the 2 million mark on PPV. This is a big event, a mega event, so we’re not worried about that, we’re worried about making sure that this fight delivers.”

I don’t believe the Cotto vs. Canelo fight will get anywhere close to bringing in 2.2 million pay-per-view buys. De La Hoya can continue to talk up the fight all he wants in hopes of bringing in more hype and more PPV buys, but I don’t think it’s going to work in attracting a ton of people to see the fight on PPV. If anything, I see the Cotto-Canelo fighting maybe bringing in 600,000 PPV buys under a best case scenario. Under a worst case scenario, I can see the Cotto vs. Canelo fight doing only 450,000 PPV buys.

Cotto and Canelo have never been big PPV draws when they’ve been the A-side as the headliner. Those two fighters have always needed the proven crossover PPV attractions Mayweather and Pacquiao to bring in the huge PPV numbers. This tells me that Cotto and Canelo, as popular as they are in the boxing world, have never achieved crossover status as we’ve seen with De La Hoya, Mayweather and Pacquiao.

What has kept Canelo and Cotto from becoming crossover stars is the big question. My guess is because they’ve failed in the past when facing the best at the highest level. Let’s be real about this. When Canelo and Cotto have stepped it up in the past against the highest rungs of the sport, they’ve been found wanting.

To be sure, Cotto and Canelo can beat the likes of a broken down Sergio Martinez, or guys like James Kirkland, but they failed when they fought Mayweather and/or Pacquiao. Canelo and Cotto are guys popular with their built in fan bases, but beyond that, they haven’t registered with the fighters outside of that demographic as of yet.

Like I said, I don’t see the Cotto-Canelo fight doing more than 600,000 PPV buys at the most, which will likely mean that the fight will do just a little bit better than the Gennady Golovkin vs. David Lemieux fight on October 17th. A fighter who is becoming a crossover star is Golovkin. He’s gaining a lot of boxing fans from the Hispanic community, and he’s someone that could soon eclipse what Cotto and Canelo are both doing with their 300,000 PPV fights. The only thing that could hold Golovkin back is his age and the likelihood that he’ll continue to have problems getting the bigger names like Cotto, Canelo and Andy Lee to fight him in the middleweight division.

De La Hoya can continue to talk up the Canelo vs. Cotto fight by making bold predictions about how many PPV buys the fight will be bringing in, but my guess is we’re going to hear silence from De La Hoya after the fight about the PPV buys. I expect we’ll finally hear the numbers released months later with a much lower number of buys than what De La Hoya has predicted. I don’t see De La Hoya ever making an announcement about the numbers because I don’t think they’re going to go beyond 600,000. There’s nothing on the Cotto-Canelo fight card for it to bring in the huge number of buys that De La Hoya is talking about. He might want 2 million fans to purchase the fight, but I don’t see that happening, at least not in this lifetime.



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