Pacquiao-Rios will have 5-city promo tour in China, then New York and Los Angeles

By Boxing News - 05/15/2013 - Comments

pac555By Chris Williams: Top Rank plans on having a 5-city promotional tour to hype Manny Pacquiao’s November 23rd fight against Brandon Rios in Macau, China. According to Steve Kim, the 5-city tour will include cities in China as well New York City and Los Angeles.

It’s unclear whether this will be enough to attract a lot of interest from Chinese and USA boxing fans in this fight because America fans tend to get more excited about fights that take place in the U.S, and this one will be in China.

Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum wanted the fight to be staged in Macau so that Pacquiao wouldn’t have to pay the normal U.S tax rate for the money that he makes from the American fans in pay per view. By having the fight take place outside of the U.S, Pacquiao can save a lot of money from taxes. Whether he’ll still come out ahead isn’t known.

If the fight doesn’t bring in huge PPV numbers like in the past then you guess that having the fight staged outside of the U.S may have been one of the causes. It also isn’t helped that Pacquiao is facing a non-PPV fighter in Rios, who has never headlined a PPV fight before. This is a risky thing for Pacquiao to do.

Rios also is coming off of a loss to Mike Alvarado last March, and Pacquiao has lost his last two fights. So asking boxing fans to pay to see two guys coming off of losses is something that could lead to diminishing returns for Pacquiao and Arum. When a stage act starts to have problems then it’s difficult to keep asking the fans to pay the same amount of money to see it.

The smart thing is to make adjustments on the product by selling it at a cheaper price to account for the fact that it’s no longer doing as well. If Arum were to sell Pacquiao’s fight against Rios for $5 to $10, I think it would do really well. But asking boxing fans to pay $60 to $70 to see two guys coming off of losses, I don’t know if that’s something that will sell, especially with the fight taking place outside of the U.S in China.



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