By Patrick McHugh: Former five division world champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. has officially given up on the idea of fighting UFC star Conor McGregor. The 39-year-old Mayweather says he attempted to put the fight together but he couldn’t do it. Why exactly the fight couldn’t get made is unclear, but it might be due to the money.
Putting Mayweather and McGregor together in the ring would have been poison anyway. McGregor would be the equivalent of a novice, and it would have ended badly. If were an exhibition bout for the fans to see, it wouldn’t have been bad. But for fans to have to buy the fight on PPV, it would have been a real negative for the sport.
Mayweather said that if he came back, he would need to get a nine-figure payday. Getting that kind of money would be hard enough, because it would require a great opponent for the boxing ring, and a network willing to give Mayweather a lot of money.
“I tried to make the fight happen between me and Conor McGregor,” Mayweather said to FightHype.com. “We wasn’t able to make the fight happen, so we must move on. I feel honored to be the biggest name in MMA and in boxing, and I don’t even compete no more.”
McGregor was said to have wanted a 50-50 deal for a fight against Mayweather. With Mayweather wanting $100 million for the fight, it meant that the fight would have needed to gross $200 million. That would be an absurd amount of money for a fight that would be a guaranteed mismatch with Mayweather destroying McGregor, who has no boxing skills at all.
McGregor has never fought before in the ring, and he looked awkward even fighting in the standup position in his MMA matches. Some fans obviously would have wound up purchasing the Mayweather-McGregor fight on PPV despite it being a total mismatch, but probably not enough for it to be a huge success. But with Mayweather wanting to get a big payday for the fight, the money likely wasn’t there for him to want to come back.
Mayweather made a lot of money in his fight against Manny Pacquiao last year, and he made good money in his other five-fights with his Showtime contract. If Mayweather had elected to continue his boxing career, he still would be making good money. However, he would need to get serious about facing better opposition than he had been fighting.
Mayweather couldn’t trot out Robert Guerrero, Andre Berto and Marcos Maidana again to fight. The boxing fans would want to see him fight the likes of Keith Thurman, Danny Garcia, Errol Spence, Shawn Porter, Pacquiao [again], Saul Canelo Alvarez [again], the Charlo brothers, Demetrius Andrade, Terence Crawford, Adrien Broner and Gennady Golovkin. I don’t think Mayweather was interested in fighting any of those guys besides maybe Garcia, who looked terribly flawed and very beatable as the WBC welterweight champion.
Mayweather might have blown his chances for getting that kind of money when he decided to fight Andre Berto in his last fight of his career last year in December rather than a big name that could potentially beat him like Gennady Golovkin. Mayweather vs. Golovkin would have likely attracted a TON of interest. Mayweather vs. Berto was little more a safe payday for Mayweather. The pay-per-view buys for the fight were poor for the Mayweather-Berto fight at 400,000 buys compared to Mayweather’s previous fights against Manny Pacquiao, Marcos Maidana I & II.
“Right now, I have Floyd running around the Showtime [Network] offices gathering my money,” said McGregor to espn.com last summer. “That’s what he’s doing. He’s running around the Showtime offices, begging those executives to come up with the $100 million cash he needs to fight me. As soon as he gets my money, we can fight.”
A fight between Mayweather and McGregor would have likely angered the boxing world even more than the fight between Mayweather and Pacquiao, because the fans wouldn’t have gotten their money’s worth in terms of a competitive match-up. Further, if the ticket and pay-per-view prices were raised through the roof like they were for the Mayweather-Pacquiao, then it would have been a disaster coming and going.
First of all, it’s doubtful that knowledgeable boxing fans would be willing to pay high prices for another Mayweather fight, given that they would know it’s a mismatch. Secondly, the fans would be angry afterwards when Mayweather winds up beating McGregor in a one-sided match lacking in drama like we saw in Mayweather’s last two fights against Berto and Pacquiao. Those were just horrible fights from start to finish.
Mayweather’s best chance of getting a big payday would likely be against Golovkin. I think the fans would purchase a Mayweather vs. Golovkin fight in high numbers, and it would create tremendous news. A rematch between Mayweather and Pacquiao or Canelo probably wouldn’t interest fans, because he already beat both of those guys easily. There would no selling point for the fights. You can’t say that Pacquiao and Canelo have improved, because they haven’t fought anyone good since their losses to Mayweather.