By Allan Fox: ESPN’s Dan Rafael says that his sources are saying that last Saturday’s Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Marcos Maidana fight pulled in close to 900,000 pay per view buys on Showtime PPV. However, it’s still far too early to know for sure what the eventual PPV numbers will be for the fight.
We may never find out what the numbers are because Showtime could choose not to release them for whatever reason. They realized the huge PPV numbers for the Mayweather vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight last year in September, but they chose not to let the public see what the PPV numbers were for Mayweather’s previous fight against Maidana last May.
“They won’t announce numbers, which means they won’t announce numbers they are disappointed by. This was Floyd’s 4th bout on his 6-fight deal. Only one has cracked a million buys, the Canelo record breaking fight they gleefully announced,” Dan Rafael said on his Chat at ESPN.com earlier on Friday.
Even if Mayweather vs. Maidana 2 didn’t bring in 1 million PPV buys, it would still have done well if the fight did close to 1 million buys. It shows that Mayweather is capable of pulling in a great deal of boxing fans to purchase his fight cards even when he’s not fighting a major star. Maidana doesn’t speak English, and his emotionless face made it difficult for me to get excited about the fight.
If Mayweather faces guys that can bring a little bit more to the table in the future in terms of their ability to speak, and with their ability to help sell the fights, we could see Mayweather bring in bigger PPV numbers. But he was always going to be asking for trouble fighting someone like Maidana.
“Maidana rematch won’t come close a million buys either. I saw some reports claiming 925k,” Rafael said. “I do not believe that at all. My sources, at least as of yesterday, were saying it might hit the high 800s, meaning a little better than the first fight. But it’s still too early on a Thursday after the fight to truly know when they are missing MAJOR cable system numbers like Comcast.”
It’s possible that the Mayweather-Maidana 2 fight could come over 1 million PPV buys when the final numbers are tallied. But Mayweather needs to look to take on bigger names in the future like Amir Khan, Manny Pacquiao, Canelo, Miguel Cotto or Gennady Golovkin. Those are the biggest fights out there for Mayweather right now.
Comments are closed.