By Allan Fox: Conor McGregor sees himself bringing home OVER $100 million for his boxing match against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in the near future. McGregor’s UFC boss Dana White believes it’ll be more like $75 million. Either way, it’s a lot of money that the 28-year-old MMA fighter stands to get for fight that he has no experience.
These projections of a big pot of money for the Mayweather-McGregor fight might not turn into reality because it’s going to require a lot of believers that it’s going to be a competitive match, and I don’t know if there’s going to be that many boxing fans as well as MMA fans that will buy into it. On paper, it’s more like a professional match where you pretty much know which guy is going to win. It’s just a bunch of theatrics without any suspense about who’s going to win.
“How’s that $75 million make your stomach feel?” McGregor said on Instagram. “It’s actually $100-plus million if we go by the non-conservative numbers the fight will actually do and that’s not including my endorsements and business ventures. 28 years of age. Fresh [expletive]. Doubt me now.”
The talk is the Mayweather-McGregor fight will be taking place in September if the match can get finalized soon. Getting Mayweather to agree to a 50-50 deal might be hard though, because he’s been the A-side for his fights for many years.
The negotiations between the two fighters are still underway, but they’re expected to be finalized soon. McGregor is the biggest star in the MMA sport. Mayweather was the biggest star in boxing before he stopped fighting 2 years ago. Whether Mayweather can still draw is the big question. Mayweather’s last fight against an over-matched Andre Berto brought in only 400,000 buys on Showtime PPV.
That was a huge drop off from the 4,600,000 buys Mayweather’s fight with Pacquiao pulled in on Showtime/Mayweather PPV on May 2, 2015. The 400K buys for the Mayweather-Berto fight was Mayweather’s lowest total since his fight with Carlos Baldomir nine years earlier in 2006. The drop off in numbers could suggest that the boxing fans are not interested in purchasing Mayweather’s fights any longer in high numbers due them being angry and being burned with his dud against Pacquiao.
The dream-like projections for the Mayweather-McGregor fight might turn out to be a non-reality, because the ship might have sailed for Mayweather. If the fans do purchase the fight, it could be mostly on McGregor’s side for fans that aren’t familiar with Mayweather’s past history and never saw his dud against Pacquiao. I don’t know if there’s enough MMA fans to bring in the huge PPV numbers that would be needed for McGregor and Mayweather both to get the big money purses that they’ll be asking for.
If McGregor is going to be hauling in $100 million+ for the fight, then what does that leave Mayweather? If the fight only pulls in 1 million buys, then there’s not going to be enough money for both guys to get $100 million each. Mayweather has said that his asking price is $100 million for starters. I don’t think this is going to a $200 million fight. Maybe it would be before Mayweather’s dud against Manny Pacquiao two years ago in 2015, but not now.
There are a lot of still angry fans that felt they were burned by the jacked up prices for what turned out to be a real let down between Mayweather and Pacquiao. The two fighters fought like they didn’t need to put out effort because they were already going to make a ton of money. The boxing fans felt ripped off, and many of those same fans turned up their noses for Mayweather’s last fight against Andre Berto in September. That was a fight that was hard to understand. Instead of Mayweather fighting relevant guys that hardcore boxing fans wanted to see him fight in Gennady Golovkin or Keith Thurman, Mayweather chose a fighter from the past in Berto, who left his best years behind him six years ago in 2011.
McGregor has no experience in the boxing ring, and he obviously isn’t to take a risk by proving himself before he faces Mayweather. At this point, I don’t think McGregor would do well against some of the aged guys that are over-the-hill. He comes from a different sport, and it takes too many years to learn how to box at a high level. Even for fighters that do put years into boxing, only a rare few ever become top tier fighters. McGregor would be facing a guy that is considered to be the best boxer of this generation in Mayweather.
The 40-year-old Mayweather is obviously not the same fighter that he once was, but he’s still good enough to clown a fighter like McGregor. A lot of boxing fans see the Mayweather-McGregor match as a “business fight” and not a genuine on the level fight. If McGregor was serious about the fight, he’d take two or three tunes-up against boxers to show that he can compete. He’s not going to do that though it would be too risky. McGregor would get exposed, and beaten badly. Once that happens, there wouldn’t be a bunch of fans willing to dump their money on paying to see Mayweather and McGregor fight each other.
White seems to think the Mayweather-McGregor fight can bring in enough money for McGregor to walk away with $75 million. If White turns out to be right about this, then we’re likely to see an avalanche of other MMA fighters calling out boxers for fights inside the boxing ring. I don’t see boxers being willing to compete in MMA, because it’s a much different sport that requires knowledge about kicking, grappling and submission holds. A boxer doesn’t have time to learn all those things.
It’s easier for an MMA fighter to try and compete in boxing, because a large of what the MMA fighters do nowadays is standing on their feet and fighting. They obviously know that the fans much prefer to see stand up fighting rather than rolling on the mat type of stuff that you see with wrestling. It’s not nearly as interesting to watch as stand up fighting.