By Erik Schmidt: In an almost absurd offer, the promotional outfit Arena Box, headed by Ahmet Oner, has reportedly offered World Boxing Association middleweight champion Felix Sturm (33-2-1, 14 KO’s) $25 million for a six fight deal to fight for their company. What makes the number seem even more absurd is that Sturm, 30, isn’t considered to be the best middleweight in the division and would be extremely lucky if he were able to get through the six fight contract without getting beaten.

One of the problems that may potentially mess up Sturm signing with Arena is that Universum, the promotional company that Sturm has been fighting with up until now, is saying that they still have a valid promotional contract with Sturm until 2012. However, if Arena is able to get Sturm’s services, they might be more inclined to set Sturm up with big money fights against top middleweights like World Boxing Council/World Boxing Organization middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik or Paul Williams.

For most of Sturm’s career, he’s been matched against a smorgasbord of mediocre fighters. The talent pool has been weak anyway in the WBA while he‘s been the champion, but his promotional company haven‘t helped him by putting him in with the weakest opponents available for his non-mandatory title defenses, often pitting him against the bottom 15 fighter each time.

As such, Sturm has had a lot of boring, one-sided fights against little known opponents like Jamie Pittman, Noe Gonzalez Alcoba and Koji Sato. Sturm could have helped himself if he had instead opted to fight tougher opponents like Anthony Mundine, Gennady Golovkin, Daniel Jacobs, Andy Lee or Hassan N’Dam N’Jikam. In Sturm’s most recent bout, he defeated Khoren Gevor by a 12 round decision.

That fight, and his one-sided win over Sebastian Sylvester, are easily the two best opponents that Sturm has fought while a champion. Sturm was defeated by Javier Castillejo by a 10th round stoppage in July 2006. Sturm avenged the loss in April 2007 with a 12 round decision win, but he didn’t look impressive in beating Castillejo.

If Sturm stays with Universum, he could end up holding down the WBA title for a long time to come, because it’s doubtful that Universum will take many chances with him by risk putting him in with a tough opponent that could possibly beat him. However, Sturm might end up losing anyway soon enough because Golovkin is ranked number #2 and N’Dam is number #3 in the WBA, and both of them would be very tough opponents for Sturm.

However, that will take at least year or more for those fighters to get a shot at Sturm, as his number #1 challenger is Mundine, a fighter that Sturm will likely be able to handle without too many problems. And, of course, if Sturm beats Mundine, Sturm will then be facing another non-mandatory challenger who will likely be picked from the bottom of the pack as usual. Sturm would be much better off going for the winner of the Pavlik-Williams fight and take a big money bout against one of them.