Is Canelo on his way to being the next superstar?

By Mauricio Carranza: Former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KO’s) is by far the most famous and recognized Junior middleweight on the planet as of today.

I say that fully knowing that Floyd Mayweather Jr is a welterweight and defeated Canelo at 152lbs, which in my eyes does not make Floyd a Jr. Middleweight champion. And also Floyd hasn’t defended either of his WBA and WBC 154 pound titles that he won off of Canelo last September in beating him by a 12 round majority decision.

Canelo is the biggest attraction in boxing, only behind Floyd even surpassing Manny Pacquiao. The numbers for his his recent pay-per-view bout against the virtually unknown Alfredo Angulo last March proved this by approaching the 400,000 PPV buys at 350K buys.

A lot of people showed interest in that fight without it having a decent undercard, or a relatively known B-side fighter. The only drawing power this fight had was Canelo, who will next be fighting in November. Following that fight, he says he’ll be fighting on the Mexican holidays in May and September in 2015. Fighting on those holidays next years will give the 24-year-old Canelo a big boost in pay-per-view sales, because Mexican fans will be willing to pay to see a big Mexican star on their holidays. The only thing that Canelo will need to work out is how to compete with Mayweather for those dates and move him off of those dates.

Canelo has another factor that can really help his superstar status in the future which is the fact that he is obviously not scared to fight the most dangerous fighters that are out there, and I understand that he had a hard time against Erislandy Lara and Floyd, but the fact he even fought Lara gives him a lot of credit.

Before he took the Lara fight, I had a lot of questions, but now I believe it’s possible that Canelo will be the next boxing superstar. A fight with WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto will be huge next year, and I wouldn’t put it past Alvarez to fight the most feared man in the middleweight division in WBA champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin after that.