Mayweather has offered $50M to Conor McGregor for fight

By Boxing News - 05/20/2016 - Comments

Floyd MayweatherBy Jeff Aranow: Boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather Jr. has reportedly offered UFC featherweight champion Conor McGregor $50 million to fight him this year before the end of the year in a giant PPV fight. Mayweather would receive nine-figures if the fight takes place. The imbalance in pay could make it tough for the fight to happen though because Mayweather would be making two times the amount that McGregor is getting if the fight takes place.

Getting the 27-year-old McGregor and his management to agree to a deal where he’s getting only half as much as Mayweather might make the fight untenable unless Mayweather is willing to give him a better cut.

It might take parity for the fight to get made unfortunately. That would mean Mayweather wouldn’t get nine figures. It would make it more like $75 million.

Mayweather says he made $70 million for his fight against Andre Berto last September. If all Mayweather is going to get is $75M for a fight against McGregor, it might not even be worth making the fight in the first place. If Mayweather must make twice as much as McGregor for him to get his nine-figure payday, then the fight is probably going to be undoable.

Mayweather might need to go in another direction if he wants his nine-figure payday like going after Gennady Golovkin, the dangerous middleweight world champion. That fight would be the equivalent of Mayweather touching the third rail. He would no room to play around in that fight because every punch that Golovkin would throw could be the end for Mayweather. Golovkin has one-punch power and he would be looking to take Mayweather’s head off with every shot.

McGregor is reportedly a bigger PPV star than Mayweather in Europe, Australia and Canada. McGregor is currently bringing in better PPV numbers than Mayweather. Mayweather’s fight against

Mayweather is going to need to work with Dan White is he wants to make a fight against McGregor a reality. White likely won’t agree to letting McGregor get paid half of what Mayweather is getting, even though McGregor has no experience in a boxing ring. Mayweather clearly needs McGregor’s name for his PPV card to be a success because the alternatives aren’t so good for the 39-year-old Mayweather. A rematch between Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao is now seemingly impossible now that Pacquiao has been elected into the senate in the Philippines.

Pacquiao is no nailed down into a job that will keep him in that position for the next six years. The other options for Mayweather in the boxing world are guys like Keith Thurman, Kell Brook, Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Golovkin. Of that bunch, only Golovkin would seem capable of giving Mayweather the huge payday that he needs for him to return to the sport. Brook, Garcia, Thurman, and Porter aren’t big enough names for Mayweather to get $100 million unless Showtime or HBO ants to throw money away by giving him the nine-figures he’s asking for and taking a huge loss on televising his fight on PPV. I wouldn’t want to be the one in charge of the network that makes that call because they could be putting their job on the line if Mayweather’s fight tanks as badly as his fight against Berto did.