By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum believes next months’ fight between his fighter WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao (56-5-2, 38 KOs) and little known Chris Algieri (20-0, 8 KOs) will bring in respectable pay-per-view numbers on HBO PPV from Macao, China. Arum specifically thinks the Pacquiao-Algieri fight will bring in as much as 950,000 pay-per-view buys, because the fight is receiving publicity.
The publicity the Pacquiao-Agieri fight doesn’t appear to be any different than Pacquiao’s fight against Brandon Rios last November, a fight that brought in only 450,000 pay-per-view buys on HBO, but Arum seems to think it’s receiving more publicity.
Much of the publicity the fight had brought in has been negative with writers touching on the subject of it being a perceived mismatch. I’m not sure that kind of publicity is going to help make the fight a success.
“Now, with Chris Algieri getting the type of publicity that he is getting, which we never had before,” Arum said via Fighthype.com. “So while it’s true that among fight fans Algieri may not be as well-known as an established guy say as Tim Bradley, among the general public, more of the public know now Algieri than they do most fighters, and therefore I think we’re going to do a number akin to what we did in a Tim Bradley fight, which is anywhere between 750,000 and 900,000 buys.”
The Pacquiao-Bradley 2 fight took place in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is why it brought in 750,000 PPV buys. Bradley was someone who was already known by American fans due to his previous fight against Pacquiao in 2012, as well as his fights against Ruslan Provodnikov, Devon Alexander, Nate Campbell, Lamont Peterson, Juan Manuel Marquez, Luis Carlos Abregu, Junior Witter, Kendell Holt and Edner Cherry. With Algieri, he only has his fight against Provodnikov for the America public to know him by, and a lot of boxing fans didn’t even see that fight.
Arum hurt his own case by choosing to stage the Pacquiao vs. Algieri fight outside if the United States in Macao, China. That means a lot of boxing fans and media members won’t be able to make the trip to the venue due to the high cost of travel.
Arum will be lucky if the Pacquiao-Algieri fight does even 400,000 pay-per-view buys, because it’s got everything going against it. Algieri can’t crack eggs, he’s not been visible in the past against big names, the boxing public sees it as a mismatch, and the fight has been staged by Arum in Macao.
Besides all that, Pacquiao and Algieri have been playing nice with one another in all of their press conferences together. There’s no animosity between them whatsoever, and they appear more like friends than adversaries. Neither guy is trash talking, and Algieri sounds like a college student giving his dissertation each time he speaks in front of the public. He doesn’t have the charisma to connect with the boxing public, and that’s not helping things. Arum needed an opponent that could at least give Pacquiao dirty looks like Provodnikov to attract interest.
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