De La Hoya thinks Cotto-Canelo will bring in 2.4M PPV buys

By Boxing News - 11/13/2015 - Comments

By Dan Ambrose: Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy promotions says his goal for the Miguel Cotto vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight this month is for the event to do half the amount of pay-per-view buys on HBO as the Manny Pacquiao vs. Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight generated last May. De La Hoya says the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight brought in roughly 4.8 million PPV buys for a fight that sold for $100 on HBO and Showtime PPV.

De La Hoya believes that by him reducing the price of the PPV fight for Cotto-Canelo to approximately half of what it cost for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, he’ll then be able to generate half the amount of PPV buys for the Cotto-Canelo fight.

So in other words, De La Hoya believes that we could be seeing the Cotto vs. Canelo fight card bringing in 2.4 million PPV buys on HBO. That’s obviously a very ambitious number, given that the interest in the Cotto-Canelo fight appears to be even less than the Mayweather vs. Canelo fight from 2013.

That fight brought in 2.2 million PPV buys, and there was a huge amount of interest in the weeks before the fight. In contrast, there’s really not that much buzz about the Cotto-Canelo fight for some reason. There’s no question that the boxing fans are talking about the fight, but there’s not an overwhelming amount of interest in the fight.

De La Hoya believes he can create huge interest in the Cotto-Canelo fight by encouraging his Facebook friends to pump up interest in the fight. I’m not sure if that’s going to work though. Fight advertisements on Facebook could be filtered out by people, who might see it as useless spam to be ignored. Let’s face it; fans are either interested in the Cotto vs. Canelo fight or not. Spamming them on Twitter and Facebook probably won’t help sell the fight on PPV. I see Ronda Rousey advertisements everywhere for her fight this Saturday, and there’s no way I’ll pay to watch it because I don’t like the way she fights, and I hate MMA.

“Our goal is to make sure the event [Cotto-Canelo] is as successful as the Manny Pacquiao-Mayweather fight,” De La Hoya said to Bloomberg.com. “Our goal is to make sure people know about Canelo-Cotto, and hopefully on November 21st, they’ll buy it to find out who the best middleweight in the world is. People know this is a real fight. This is a fight that is going to be guaranteed action. Canelo, my guy, is a young bull, who is just as strong. He’s 10 years younger [than Cotto]. This is one of those where it can’t miss. People know that. So what I’m thinking is Manny Pacquiao-Mayweather generated 4.8 million homes for pay-per-view at $100 a pop. So what we did was slash the price in half. If we generate half the business that fight did, then we’re in great shape. It’s all about thinking outside the box. The younger generation don’t want to be told what to watch and think differently. So what we’re doing now is the social media initiative, and that’s going to be a big boost for the fight. For instance, we’re calling all our friends on Facebook that have millions of followers. So we’re doing an initiative,” De La Hoya said.

I don’t think the Cotto vs. Canelo fight will bring in half the amount of PPV buys as Mayweather-Pacquiao. I don’t see the fight doing over 2 million PPV buys. Those are crazy numbers. Right now, I’m thinking that Cotto-Canelo brings in between 500,000 to 650,000 PPV buys at best. No way do I see it hitting 1 million buys, because the interest in the fight just isn’t there from the boxing public. Both fighters were beaten by Mayweather, and Cotto lost to Pacquiao.

We’re talking second level fighters in Cotto and Canelo, aren’t we? Neither Cotto nor Canelo has shown interest in fighting Gennady Golovkin, the guy who is perceived by boxing fans to be the best fighter in the middleweight division. That obviously doesn’t help their popularity. What further hurts Cotto and Canelo is their use of catch-weight handicaps to get an advantage over their opponents. Canelo has fought at catch-weights since 2014, and the Cotto has been doing the same thing.

The Cotto-Canelo 24/7 series on HBO was dull to watch for me. Canelo still doesn’t speak in English, and it forces you to read his words transcribed. For his part, Cotto has said very little in the way of negative things about Canelo. Both of them have been too nice to each other in the buildup to the fight, and there’s a complete lack of theatrics with these guys.

De La Hoya is a little off when he says that the Cotto-Canelo fight will sell for half the price the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight sold for. Cotto vs. Canelo is going for $59.99 on HBO PPV. The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight went for $100. The Cotto-Canelo fight is more than half the price of the Mayweather v s. Pacquiao fight. The undercard for the Cotto vs. Canelo fight isn’t very good in my view. There’s nothing there on the undercard that I want to see.

Of course, it was the same thing for the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight card. Their undercard was just absolutely terrible, as if it was done on the cheap so that most of the money could be given to Mayweather and Pacquiao. I didn’t bother watching it live because it was too cheap of a card in my view, and I had a feeling that the main event between those two fighters would be a letdown.

“My thing is if she [Ronda Rousey] convinced that she can become a world champion, and I think she is, a world champion in boxing, then give me a call,” De La Hoya said. “I’d be more than happy to promote her. It’s a win-win for everybody. The idea of putting her [Rousey] on Ring Magazine is she is starting to learn the boxing game, and she does want to become world champion in boxing. I know she is under contract with UFC, but the day she wants to become a boxer, we’re right here waiting,” De La Hoya said.

Rousey, a UFC female champion, was recently put on the cover of Ring Magazine, the magazine De La Hoya owns. It made no sense at all to have Rousey on the cover because it’s a boxing magazine and Rousey is a MMA fight. It’s like having a picture of sailboat racing on the cover of Golf Digest. You open the magazine thinking you’re going to read about Golf, and you get stuck reading about sailboat racing. For boxing fans who subscribe to Ring Magazine, they were less than happy to have news on a female MMA fighter in the magazine instead of boxing.

De La Hoya believes that Rousey will eventually turn to boxing at some point and look to win a world title. I don’t think that’s going to happen, because there isn’t big money in female boxing right now. It’s not like with females in MMA. Further, Rousey is 28-years-old now, and under contract with UFC. She’s making too much money in that sport for her to drift away when her contract ends so that she can be punched in the face for a living in boxing. There’s also the age factor. Rousey isn’t young at 28, and if she takes up boxing in a few years in her 30s, she’ll he dealing with much younger fighters than her.

Rousey is good at using her judo skills in MMA to flip her opponents on the canvas and then jump on them with her plump body, but she won’t be able to do that in boxing. Being kind of plump, won’t help her in boxing. She won’t be able to use her signature flip move, and she won’t be able to jump on her opponents. I think De La Hoys is wasting his time if he thinks that Rousey will leave MMA for a career in boxing.

I just hope for the sake of the Ring Magazine subscribers, De La Hoya doesn’t continue to put Rousey on the cover of the magazine, because I don’t think it’s a good thing if you’re trying to sell magazines. If I was one of the subscribers to Ring Magazine, I would cancel my subscription if I started seeing MMA fighters on the cover of the magazine, because that’s not a sport I want to read about. I don’t like wrestling type stuff, and I hate the boring submission holds of the MMA sport. It’s really dull and too much like high school wrestling, which I did.



Comments are closed.