By Chris Williams: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer predicted months ago that the May 1st bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Shane Mosley would reach 3 million pay-per-view buys by the time the final numbers are in. I don’t that’s going to happen. Actually, I see Mayweather vs. Mosley doing just a little better than 1 million PPV buys. In other words, a little bit better than the 1 million that Mayweather got for his last fight against Juan Manuel Marquez last year in September.
I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Mayweather vs. Mosley does worse than Mayweather-Marquez, because Floyd had a lot of help in that fight because Marquez got a lot of Mexican fans that scooped up his fight on PPV, which really helped the numbers in a big way for this fight.
The problem with Mayweather-Mosley is that neither of these fighters have brought in huge numbers when not matched against an exciting opponent. Mayweather got his best numbers when he was pitted against Oscar De La Hoya in 2007. That fight brought in over 2 million PPV buys. In Mayweather’s fight against Ricky Hatton in December 2007, Floyd got only a modest 850,000, mainly because he was the main draw in this fight because the casual boxing fan had never heard of Hatton before that fight. 850,000 isn’t a bad number, I’ll admit, but it’s not exactly 3 million, and it tells you how popular Mayweather is when not matched against a well known American star. Mosley, as good as he is, has never been able to bring in big numbers in any of his fights that didn’t involve De La Hoya.
Mosley’s fights with Fernando Vargas brought in modest numbers of 415,000 for the first fight and 350,000 for the second bout. That shows you that Mosley isn’t a big enough star to bring in huge numbers for a fight against Mayweather. Both of these guys are popular, but they seem to need a big named opponent like boxing’s cash cow Manny Pacquiao to bring in the kind of numbers that Schaefer is talking about. While I think Mayweather vs. Mosley will likely come in at a shade above 1 millions PPV buys, that’s a far cry from what Schaefer was talking about in his prediction earlier.
What’s really telling about the Mayweather-Mosley fight is that with about two weeks to go before the fight, the bout is barely being discussed at all on the internet boxing forums. The fight just hasn’t caught on with boxing fans for some reason or another. Perhaps it’s because of the age of Mosley or the fact that Mayweather has had only one fight in the past three years and appears to be coming back for money only. Whatever the case, the fight isn’t being talked up on the internet. There’s something missing here.
Maybe it’s because a lot of people aren’t giving Mosley a chance because of his age and his recent inactivity. It also could be because neither of these fighters have been huge PPV attractions like De La Hoya was. Mayweather isn’t being helped here in this fight in that he’s fighting Mosley, a person who is shy and quiet by nature. That kind of opponent doesn’t catch the interest of boxing fans, who seem to prefer the ones that are loud, crazy and trash talk 24/7. Mosley will never be like one of those fighters and when he does trash talk a little, it sounds forced and not genuine.
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