By Eric Thomas: With Bob Arum stating that his fighter Manny Pacquiao won’t be available to fight on May 5th, WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. (42-0, 26 KO’s) will reportedly be making a decision next week about who his opponent will be on May 5th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Given that the date of May 5th is Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday, Mayweather is expected to face WBC junior middleweight champion Saul Alvarez (39-0-1, 29 KO’s) next. Alvarez, 21, has already said he’s very interested in facing Mayweather next, and both of them work with Golden Boy Promotions, so making this fight won’t involve the cross promotion hassle of dealing with a Top Rank vs. Golden Boy tug of war.

The date is perfect for Mayweather-Alvarez because Floyd can take advantage of the Cinco De Mayo holiday to get a lot of Mexican boxing fans that will already be celebrating the holiday and will likely purchase the Mayweather-Alvarez PPV fight in droves.

According to examiner.com, Arum is saying that May 5th is too soon for him to properly promote the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight. Arum feels like he needs more than three months to market the fight. Moreover, Arum also feels that the MGM Grand in Vegas only has a seating capacity of 16,800 and Arum would like a much larger venue for a fight of this magnitude. In the past, Arum has talked about wanting to put the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight at the Texas Stadium in Arlington, Texas. This is a stadium that fits up to 90,000 fans. Mayweather has been cool to this idea and prefers fighting in his home city of Vegas.

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Alvarez doesn’t have a lot of experience against top level opposition and only recently won the World Boxing Council belt with a win over welterweight Mathew Hatton. In three title defenses, Alvarez has beaten Ryan Rhodes, Alfonso Gomez and Kermit Cintron, none of them being a real threat to him. Golden Boy hasn’t been in a hurry to match Alvarez up with anyone that would be a real threat to him. However, they’ll obviously be more than happy to put Alvarez with Mayweather due to the big money that the fight can generate.