By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum would like nothing better than to match his money fighter WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) against WBA/WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr (46-0, 26 KOs) in 2015 in what would be far the biggest payday of the 35-year-old Pacquiao’s career.
Since the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight obviously isn’t going to happen for many reasons, Arum wants to set Pacquiao up for a 5th fight against aging warrior Juan Manuel Marquez (56-7-1, 40 KOs) in what could be a big enough fight to bring Pacquiao’s deteriorating pay-per-view numbers back up to the 1 million mark that he used to hit every time he fought for a span of two years.
Boxing fans have seemingly lost interest in seeing Pacquiao fight over-matched opposition or against the same fighters over and over again without him fighting interesting opposition with a chance to actually beat him.
With Pacquiao’s PPV numbers down and likely to take an even worst hit in his next fight against little known Chris Algieri on November 22nd, Arum is hoping to trot out 41-year-old Marquez to fight Pacquiao in 2015. But for Arum to get Marquez, he’s going to need to give him a purse split that makes it worthwhile for him.
Marquez reportedly wants a 50-50 split before he’ll agree to another fight against Pacquiao. Obviously, Arum isn’t going to give Marquez anything close to that. What it comes down to is whether Arum will be able to convince Marquez to accept a far less than 50-50 deal to fight Pacquiao. The last time they fought, Marquez got a 76/24 split of the loot.
The fight brought in over 1 million pay-per-view buys. Pacquiao hasn’t come close to that since in fighting Brandon Rios and Tim Bradley, and his fight against Algieri in November will be lucky if it breaks 400,000 PPV buys.
I doubt that Arum is going to be able to get Marquez to fight Pacquiao again unless he gives him more of the huge loot that the Pacquiao-Marquez fights bring in. But even if Arum does put them together, it doesn’t solve Arum’s long term problem of not having new blood for Pacquiao to fight. He can’t keep up with the rematches because Marquez is on his way out of the sport, and boxing fans likely won’t want to see Pacquiao fighting Bradley and Algieri over and over again. Arum needs new blood for his stable.
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