By Chris Williams: Photo credit: Sumio Yamada – Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer sees this Saturday’s mega fight between undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. (41-0, 25 KO’s) and WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz (29-2-2, 22 KO’s) bringing in between 1.7 to 1.8 million pay per view buys.
This would make it the second largest PPV fight ever, behind the 2.4 million PPV buys the Mayweather vs. Oscard De La Hoya fight brought in during 2007. In comparison, Manny Pacquiao, who is supposed to be boxing’s cash cow in the minds of some boxing fans, brought in 1.3 million buys for his fight against and over the hill 39-year-old Shane Mosley recently, and 1.25 million buys for Pacquiao’s bout against a shot Oscar De La Hoya in 2008.
The reason this is important is that if Mayweather can bring in between 1.7 to 1.8 million PPV buys for the Ortiz fight and Pacquiao comes up with much lower numbers for his third fight against Juan Manuel Marquez in November, it would put Mayweather in a position to ask for more than 50% of the revenue for a fight against Pacquiao.
You can’t realistically expect Pacquiao to get the same amount of money for a fight against Mayweather when Mayweather is bringing in the bigger numbers over and over again. Huge PPV numbers for the Mayweather vs. Ortiz fight will put Mayweather in a very good bargaining position for a fight against Pacquiao. You really can’t argue that Pacquiao deserves an equal amount as Mayweather when Pacquiao simply isn’t bringing in the cash the way that Mayweather is.
Speaking with mlive.com, Schaefer said “The numbers should be somewhere between 1.7 or 1.8 million range.”
There it is. Schaefer has been doing his math already using his own detailed approach to adding up the potential numbers and he feels that this is going to be a huge PPV fight for Mayweather-Ortiz. At the very least, the fight will bring in 1.5 million but it should bring in better numbers.
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