Purses: Cotto $15M, Canelo $5M

By Boxing News - 11/20/2015 - Comments

cotto12(Photo credit: WBC Boxing) By Tim Fletcher: Besides experience, Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) will have a huge advantage in the money he’ll be making for his fight against 25-year-old former WBA/WBC 154lb champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) tomorrow night at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Cotto will be getting a guaranteed purse of $15 million for the fight compared to Canelo’s $5 million. Canelo could get more money from the Mexico TV money. There also be an upside with the pay-per-view money the two fighters will be getting. The fight will be televised on HBO PPV. Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya is predicting the fight will bring in between 1.5 to 2.5 million pay-per-view buys.

If that many boxing fans purchase the fight on Saturday, then it will definitely bring both fighters a good payday. However, there’s no way of knowing exactly how many PPV buys the fight will bring in. The fight didn’t sellout, and that’s usually an indication that there won’t be a lot of PPV buys.

Last month’s fight between Gennady Golovkin and David Lemieux sold out the week of the fight, and it ended up with only 150,000 PPV buys on HBO. That fight had a ton of hype about it ahead of time. If Cotto-Canelo brings in 300,000 PPV buys or less, then it’ll be a huge disappointment in the boxing community.

The only thing you could say is that the boxing fans were jaded from their bad experience with the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao fight last May, and decided not to waste their hard-earned money on yet another PPV fight.

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It’ll be a sign that the boxing promoters and HBO need to back off on all the PPV fights, because they’re pushing them at too rapid a pace. Boxing fans might not like the idea of seeing their cable bills double in price ever other month for fights that aren’t PPV worthy.

Official purses for Cotto-Canelo per NSAC: Cotto $15M, Canelo $5M. Both can make more on upside, Canelo likely getting more via Mexico TV,” Dan Rafael said on his Twitter.

What could hurt the Cotto-Canelo card is the lack of a quality undercard. The undercard fights aren’t really super exciting. You have Guillermo Rigondeaux taking a stay busy fight against featherweight Drian Francisco. There are just not a lot of great fights to get the fans excited about the card once you get past the main event between Cotto and Canelo.

The good news is that with the undercard not having many big names, it means that Cotto and Canelo were able to get the lion’s share of the money for the card. The bad news is that the card could be hurt by a lack of a quality undercard.

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Former WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward had to pull out of the card due to an injury. Not having Ward on the card obviously hurts because he’s well-known and a lot of boxing fans would have wanted to see Ward fight, even though he didn’t have a good opponent.



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