By Chris Williams: With the bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao looking increasingly more and more like it’s not going to happen, Mayweather will need to find a replacement opponent to fight instead of Pacquiao in his next fight – whenever that is. Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum is already is looking to put Pacquiao in with either Antonio Margarito or Miguel Cotto next, if the Mayweather fight can’t be made.
There’s also the longshot of having Pacquiao fight Juan Manuel Marquez for a third time, but that’s not likely to happen because Marquez doesn’t fight for Top Rank and Arum likes to keep his fights in house.
If Pacquiao does wind up fighting Margarito or – perish the thought – a rematch with Cotto, this will be another golden opportunity for Mayweather to bring in much bigger pay-per-view numbers with a fight against WBC welterweight champion Andre Berto.
Although Berto isn’t a huge star, he’s been shown enough times on HBO so that he’s pretty well known and is almost – but not quite – a household name in the U.S. He is very exciting to watch because of his fast hand and good power.
He would make for a very exciting opponent for Mayweather if he were to select him next. As of now, Berto still doesn’t have an opponent yet for his next fight and this would be a great chance for Mayweather to scoop him up before Berto and his promoter find another option. Mayweather doesn’t have anything to worry about from Pacquiao, because he won’t be put in with Berto, because he’s not a Top Rank fighter.
This is Mayweather’s chance to make Pacquiao look bad again by doing much better PPV numbers than him, which should help in future negotiations with Arum for a Pacquiao fight. Pacquiao brought in only 700,000 PPV buys for his last fight against Joshua Clottey last March. Mayweather came in with 1.4 million PPV buys for his fight against Shane Mosley in May. Better, 26, may be even more popular than Mosley, and it’s very likely that Mayweather-Berto could haul in more than 1.4 million buys.
Depending on what Mayweather’s split would be of the finances, he would end up making another $40 million or more for a fight against Berto. That would excellent for Mayweather. In contrast, Pacquiao will probably end up fighting Cotto again and it’s doubtful that boxing fans will want to pay to see this fight again in the same numbers as last time given how one-sided their fight was last November. Pacquiao stopped Cotto in the 12th round.
The fight did over 1 million PPV buys. However, a rematch between them might come in short of that mark and then Pacquiao could find himself in bad shape in trying to put together a fight with Mayweather. You just can’t have the lesser PPV buys fight after fight and think it’s not going to hurt you when it comes time to putting together a fight with a star like Mayweather.
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