(Photo credit: Naoki Fakuda) By Dan Ambrose: According to Dan Rafael, there are still a lot of tickets available for Saturday’s mega fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Miguel Cotto at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Rafael says on his twitter “There are tons of Mayweather-Cotto tix out there. Prices will drop as the fight gets closer.”
This is kind of surprising because it’s a fairly popular fight and the venue is only 20,000 seats at the MGM Grand. If Mayweather-Cotto can’t sellout the MGM Grand, then this could be a bad sign as far as the pay-per-view numbers go. Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer is under the impression that the Mayweather-Cotto fight will bring in the highest PPV numbers since Mayweather’s fight against Oscar De La Hoya in 2007. That fight brought in the highest PPV totals ever with 2.4 million buys. For Mayweather vs. Cotto to be the highest since the De La Hoya-Mayweather fight, they would have to eclipse the 1.45 million buys that the Manny Pacquiao vs. Juan Manuel Marquez fight brought in last November.
That was a big fight because the guys had already fought twice before, and both are incredibly popular fighters. Marquez had a lot of Mexican fans of his that obviously helped the numbers and it’s not surprising that the fight did so well. You could see that it was going to be a big fight well before the fight, because it sold early and there was a lot of discussion about the fight well before it took place. The Mayweather-Cotto fight will no doubt bring in good numbers by the time the figures are totaled out, but it may not surpass the Marquez-Pacquiao fight or come even close to the 2.4 million buys that the Mayweather vs. De La Hoya fight brought in.
Part of the problem for the Cotto-Mayweather fight is that some boxing fans see Cotto as damaged goods from his loss to Antonio Margarito in 2008 and his beat down against Manny Pacquiao in 2009. Cotto has won his last three fights, but he’s not faced anyone really good. He’s been matched up against guys with physical problems or old age.
He’s not been put in with a young fighter that didn’t have some kind of ailment or age related problem holding him back. It just looks like Cotto has been matched against guys that were a safe choice to keep him winning rather than really testing Cotto against the best in the 154 pound division.
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