By Allan Fox: Former 8 division world champion Manny Pacquiao says that there were negotiations going on between his side and Amir Khan (31-3, 19 KOs) for his April 9th fight. However, because of middle men on Khan’s side, the negotiations failed to work out. Pacquiao didn’t say who precisely the middle men on Khan’s side were unfortunately, so we’ll never know.

It could be that someone in Khan’s negotiating team rubbed Pacquiao’s 84-year-old promoter Bob Arum the wrong way, and this led to the negotiations quickly fizzling out. It probably wouldn’t have taken much for Arum to lose patience with Khan’s team in the negotiations, because Khan isn’t one of his Top Rank stable fighters and Pacquiao has been fighting a lot of Arum’s fighters over the years.

“Yes, before this fight with Timothy Bradley we were negotiating and trying to fix and get it done, this fight with Amir, but it didn’t work out,” Pacquiao said to skysports.com. “There were a lot of middle men – in negotiations – a lot of representatives from him and that is the reason.”

Instead of Pacquiao fighting Khan, he wound up fighting WBO 147lb champion Tim Bradley (33-1-1, 13 KOs) in a third fight. The fight will be televised on HBO pay-per-view at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. While the hardcore boxing fans are not too thrilled at the idea of watching Pacquiao and Bradley face each other for a third time, the casual fans are the ones that will determine whether the fight is a success or not in terms of PPV buys.

Arum is going to promote the fight to the best of his ability, and load up the undercard with Mexican talent, he says. The card might do well and even equal the 900,000 PPV buys of the recent Miguel Cotto vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight last November on HBO PPV.

“We don’t know but after this I’m going to retire so it’s impossible,” Pacquiao said about a fight against Khan in the future.

Khan has been passed over once again by a major star. He lost out on the Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight to fighters with a hot hand, and now he’s losing out on a fight against Pacquiao for the same reason. You can understand why Mayweather and Pacquiao chose to pass up a fight against Khan. He’s not going much with his career in terms of fighting big names, so you can’t fight him based on him coming off of important wins.

Mayweather fought Maidana twice after he earned the first fight with a victory over Adrien Broner. Mayweather fought Andre Berto due to him looking good in knocking out Josesito Lopez. Pacquiao chose Bradley after his impressive win over Brandon Rios.

It doesn’t matter that Rios was a little overweight for the Bradley fight. What matters is Bradley looked good in beating him. Khan doesn’t have any wins that stand out recently. He struggled to beat Chris Algieri last May in winning a narrow 12 round decision. That shouldn’t have been a hard fight for Khan, given how easily Pacquiao beat Algieri.