By Chris Williams: In the last couple of days there’s been rumors that the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Marcos Maidana fought drew between 800,000 and 900,000 pay-per-view buys on Showtime. If those numbers turned out to be true, it would be a very disappointing number for the fight given Mayweather’s tremendous popularity, and the fight card having the highly popular Adrien Broner and Amir Khan on the undercard. Showtime’s head of Sports Stephen Espinoza says that rumors are totally false, and the the PPV numbers for the fight are still be tabulated.
“No numbers yet,” Espinoza said to thesweetscience. “Cable hasn’t even reported yet. Any numbers floating are are pure speculation.”
I figured as much when I first head the rumors of Mayweather-Maidana bringing in 800,000 buys. That number would be far too low for a superstar like Mayweather, especially given that he staged the fight against Latin fighter on the Cinco de Mayo holiday. There’s no way that the fight would bring in anything less than 1 million buys, and more likely between 1.3 million to 1.6 million buys. The fight and the fight card was far too interesting for boxing fans for it to end up with a low figure like the one that it’s rumored to be.
Mayweather won the fight by a 12 round majority decision by the scores 116-112, 117-111 and 114-114 in a fight that had fans sitting at the edge of their seats due to the excitement and competitive nature of the match. Mayweather had said he was going to go toe-to-toe with Maidana, and that’s exactly what he did. He traded with Maidana and proved that he could beat him at his own game.
Now the only question is will Mayweather give Maidana a rematch. Maidana badly wants a second fight, because this might be the only chance he has in getting a huge payday fight. But Mayweather has a lot of things to think about. Unless the fight brings in huge PPV buys, it won’t be worth it for him to fight Maidana again, because the rematch would likely bring in fewer PPV buys. It’s like someone giving a speech. The first time the speech is well received. But if that person keeps giving the same speech to the same audience, the people are going to be turned off and start walking out left and right.
A second fight between Mayweather and Maidana will no doubt be purchased by a lot of new fans interested in seeing the fight, but for the fans who already paid to see the first fight, they may lose fans because they’ll be less inclined to pay to see Mayweather beat Maidana again. That’s why rematches are really bad idea in general unless the fight is so incredibly close and/or exciting that the same fans won’t mind paying to see them fight again. We didn’t see that with this one though. Mayweather was very impressive in dominating Maidana in the second half of the fight, and taking the decision. Maidana won’t stand a chance in the rematch because Mayweather will fight his normal fight, and likely make Maidana look like he has shoelaces tied together.
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