(Photo credit: Star Boxing) By Chris Williams: If Manny Pacquiao and Bob Arum don’t want to come up with Juan Manuel Marquez’s asking price to fight Pacquiao for a 5th time next November, then they won’t have to worry too much about getting WBO light welterweight champion Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KO’s) to come in at the price that they want.
Algieri doesn’t have the same kind of pull that Marquez does in terms of being the one that brings in the huge pay-per-view buys due his massive Mexican fan base. When Pacquiao’s not fighting Marquez, he’s bringing in under 1 million PPV buys. But with Marquez, he gets well over 1 million buys. The thing is Marquez knows that it’s his fans who are pumping up the PPV numbers for his fights with Pacquiao, so he’ll want big cash in order to agree to fight the aging Filipino star.
They can either pay Marquez the green that he wants or they can be the 800 pound gorilla to get Algieri to accept a considerably smaller offer than what Marquez wants.
Algieri has a number of fans in the East Coast, but he’s not going to be able to make any demands for a Pacquiao fight. If Arum and Pacquiao want to offer Algieir less than what they’ve offered other opponents then there’s probably not much Algieri can do about it other than to agree to it unless he wants to get even less in a rematch against Russian Ruslan Provodnikov later this year, provided that his eye heals up in the next 3-4 months to fight again this year.
If Marquez is the one that’s bringing in the PPV buys then Pacquiao and Arum need to give him the money that he wants so that the fight can happen again. Giving him 25% of the loot when it’s his fans who are pumping up the PPV numbers doesn’t seem like it’s going to get him to agree to the deal. Marquez is a math whiz, and he obviously knows how much he’s worth for a Pacquiao fight.
At the end of the day, I see Arum having Pacquiao fight Algieri because they can then take the lion’s share of the loot and leave Algieri with the much, much smaller purse. With Marquez, he knows what he brings to the table for a Pacquiao fight, and he’s not going to accept a trifle to sign this time.
Comments are closed.