De La Hoya expects Cotto-Canelo to draw over 1 million PPV buys on HBO

By Boxing News - 11/15/2014 - Comments

canelo67By Dan Abrose: Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya is confident that the proposed May 2nd showdown between WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs) and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) will bring in over 1 million pay-per-view buys on HBO, and give the two fighters the biggest paydays of their careers.

The Cotto-Canelo fight likely won’t do nearly as well as when the two fighters each fought Floyd Mayweather Jr . However, they’ll be getting a much bigger purse split in facing each other than they did against Mayweather, and that ultimately could mean a bigger payday for them if the fight does as well on HBO PPV as De La Hoya seems to think it will.

De La Hoya thinks the Cotto-Canelo fight see both fighters agree to a 50-50 purse split. That remains to be seen though, because Cotto will likely insist on being the A-side of the equation due to him having the WBC 160 pound title in his possession, and the far superior experience of the two.

“My next move is going to be to give [Top Rank promoter] Bob Arum [Cotto’s promoter] a call and start discussing the fight with Bob,” De La Hoya said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “This is the type of fight that can get made easier than most, certainly easier than Pacquiao-Mayweather. The reason I say that is because both guys want to fight,” De La Hoya said.

What could ultimately hurt Cotto and Canelo in terms of getting the most out of their fight is Canelo’s stubborn insistence on fighting on Cinco de Mayo on May 2nd in 2015. There’s nothing wrong with Canelo wanting to fight on that date, but the problem is that Mayweather has already said that he plans on fighting on that date. By being stubborn and insisting on fighting on the same night as Mayweather, Canelo will likely wind up with far less money than he would have made had he not had anyone to compete against for PPV buys like Mayweather.

Mayweather is more popular than either Canelo or Cotto. So if boxing fans have to pick between which fight they’re going to see on May 2nd, you can bet that the majority of the fans will select the Mayweather fight, given that he beat both Canelo and Cotto.

The Canelo-Cotto fight is a good one, but we are talking about a fight that is more of a loser’s bracket than a winners. They both fought Mayweather and were schooled. Cotto has turned his career around since then in facing two aging fighters in Delvin Rodriguez and Sergio Martinez, but he’s not fought anyone good. Martinez had a knee problem when he fought Cotto, and he was coming off of a long layoff.



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