By Jeff Aranow: Floyd Mayweather Jr. is making a comeback to grab some more money fighting hopeless case Conor McGregor at 154 pounds on August 26 on Showtime PPV at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is a fight that means little more than money for Mayweather because it’s surely not going to be a competitive fight. The fight could bring in as much as $600 million if the amount of interest is as high as some think it will be in the boxing world.
There are still several unfinished items for the Mayweather-McGregor fight that still need to be solved for their August 26 fight.
Those are these items:
– Cost of pay-per-view on Showtime
– Ticket prices
– Media tour for fighters: For the Mayweather-McGregor fight to alert the casual boxing fans, they’ll need to hit a lot of cities around the U.S and presumably McGregor’s home country of Ireland.
What’s interesting though is how little interest the fight is attracting from hardcore boxing fans. If you look around social media and on boxing sites, the fans were only briefly interested in discussing the Mayweather-McGregor fight. For the most part, boxing fans responded with posts expressing their shock, disappointment and disgust that the Mayweather-McGregor fight had been made. An hour later, the fans were more involved in talking about serious fights between Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev.
It’s as if the fans realize what the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight is all about, which you can argue is just money for the two fighters in what amounts to be a money grab. There are still angry fans from Mayweather’s fight against Manny Pacquiao from 2015. That fight failed to deliver despite the high price tag.
According to McGregor’s UFC boss Dana White, it was an easy fight to make with Mayweather’s management.
“There really weren’t any,” White said via espn.com. “It’s been one of the smoothest deals we’ve ever done.”
“It was one of the smoothest I’ve ever been involved in,” said Showtime executive Stephen Espinoza said.
“I third that. This is really going to be a lot of fun. I can’t wait to get started with this,” said Mayweather Promotions president Leonard Ellerbe.
The 40-year-old Mayweather will be coming out of his near 2-year retirement from boxing to fight UFC star McGregor. There’s nobody doubting McGregor’s skills in the UFC. It’s obvious he’s a good fighter in the UFC, because he’s proven it again and again. However, where McGregor hasn’t proven himself is in boxing. This is going to be a real rush job for McGregor to go through an entire training camp
“Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor are such unique individuals,” White said. “It’s a fun fight. This isn’t some fight we went out to make or build. This thing built itself. The fans wanted to see this thing, the media went crazy for it and here we are.”
McGregor is going to get a BIG payday in the Mayweather fight. It doesn’t matter if McGregor loses the contest. He’s going to get a ton of money, and Dana White is going to have a fighter that is more popular from having fought Mayweather. Whether that means that boxing fans will start paying o see McGregor UFC fights on PPV remains to be seen.
The fans will have to really like what they see and hear from McGregor for them to want to keep paying to see him fight beyond the Mayweather fight. I don’t know if I would want to pay to see McGregor fight in the UFC, because his fights are over with so quickly. McGregor will be better off having fought Mayweather because of his increased popularity. The UFC should come out ahead from this fight.
The media seems more interested in the Mayweather vs. McGregor than the boxing public right now. Unless the MMA fans are going to get sucked into this fight, it may be dead on arrival on August 26, because I don’t think the boxing fans in the U.S are going to go for this fight. Perhaps if the media puts out tons of articles and interviews of the fighters, it may carry over to the fans. But right now, it doesn’t seem like the interest is high in this fight. The reaction from the fans has largely been shock and disgust that the fight is being made.
You have to remember that the fans are still upset with the dull fight between Saul Canelo Alvarez and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. on May 6 last month on HBO PPV. The fans that paid to see that fight were not too happy at the lack of action and the one-sided nature of the fight. The fans that remembered Mayweather for his last two fights against Andre Berto and Manny Pacquiao are still likely upset with Mayweather. He promised those fights would have action and would be interesting to watch They turned out to be both very boring fights that put the boxing fans to sleep/ Those were the fans that weren’t angry at the paying to see a fight that failed to have any fireworks whatsoever.
The good news for Mayweather and his fans is he’s likely going to end his 6-year knockout drought. Mayweather hasn’t knocked anyone out since his controversial sucker punch knockout of Victor Ortiz in 2011. That wasn’t even fair. Ortiz apologizes to Mayweather for head-butting him, and then next second Mayweather is clobbering him as he’s pulling away from hugging him.
It was still credited as a knockout for Mayweather. He’ll have a great chance of knocking out McGregor on August 26, as long as he’s willing to throw enough punches to stop him. You never know what you’re going to get with Mayweather in a fight. He may choose to play it safe for 12 rounds like he did against Manny Pacquiao and Andre Berto. Both of those fights were there to be knocked out, but Mayweather played it safe both times.
One question some boxing fans are wondering about Mayweather is why he’s willing to fight McGregor at 154 pounds, but not Gennady Golovkin. The Kazakhstan fighter said he would move down from 160 to 154 to accommodate Mayweather. Despite Mayweather saying he would beat Golovkin, he never even considered taking the fight. Mayweather isn’t willing to fight Golovkin at 154, but he’s going to fight at that weight against McGregor.
One thing is clear about the Mayweather-McGregor fight. It’s going to require a lot of building up of McGregor by Mayweather, his team and the media in order for him to be seen as someone that has a chance of winning on August 26. It’s important for McGregor to be viewed as having a chance of winning the fight, because if it just looks like it’s going to be a slaughter in favor of Mayweather, then the fans aren’t going to want to purchase the fight in high numbers.
You have to realize that the fight is going to likely cost $100 on Showtime PPV. What fan in his right mind is going to want to pump $100 on a mismatch if they already know the outcome of the fight in predicting a win for Mayweather. The boxing and MMA fans might as well be flushing their money down the toilet, because that’s pretty much what they’d be doing.
Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe seems to be already starting with building up McGregor to make him seem like he’s better than he is.
“When Conor steps in there with his stand-up game I’m very impressed,” Ellerbe said via espn.com. “Even when he grazes them it’s like, ‘Damn! He [expletive] him up.’ He better not graze Floyd with one those punches. I’m a realist. Floyd is 40 years old. He’s been off for a minute. He needs to get himself up. Conor has been active and he’s been knocking guys out. We’d be damn fools to sleep on him. Floyd’s ass is getting out there running. He knows Conor is coming for him.”
It might take more building up of McGregor by Ellberbe and Mayweather to convince the fans that he’s got a chance of winning, because right now he’s just seen as a guy with no chance by the people that know the sport.
I still have doubts whether Mayweather-McGregor is going to bring in a ton of PPV buys. I don’t think McGregor is well-known enough in the U.S for him to bring in a massive amount of buys. McGregor is known enough by the MMA fans to get around 1 million buys each time he fights, but not much more than that. Mayweather’s last fight against Andre Berto brought in only 400,000 PPV buys on September 12, 2015. That was a tremendous drop off of buys from Mayweather’s previous 11 fights on PPV. The drop off in numbers could be explained by the theory that Mayweather lost a great deal of fans due to his dull fight and poor effort he put in against Pacquiao.
Many boxing fans were angry with Mayweather. If the fans are still angry with Mayweather and view him as someone just looking for money, then he might not be able to attract a lot of buys from his side. It would mean that only McGregor would be pulling in the buys. As we’ve seen in McGregor’s last 3 fights on PPV in the UFC, he can consistently pull in 1 million buys. But for the Mayweather-McGregor fight to do the huge numbers that the Mayweather-Pacquiao pulled in, fans will need to be interested in paying to see Mayweather. I’m not sure that they are. You need to entertain in boxing to be a big seller, and Mayweather hasn’t done that since his first fight with Marcos Maidana.