By Chris Williams: In the last week a lot of boxing fans have begun to panic due to the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Manny Pacquiao negotiations taking a lot of time. The fans think the fight won’t have enough time left to get negotiated for them to be able to have any kind of marketing campaign to promote the fight.
As Dan Rafeal points out, Mayweather’s fight negotiations with Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero didn’t get completed until February 19th in 2013, yet they were still able to market the fight and it did reasonably well with over 800,000+ pay-per-view buys.
“Put it this way — they stretched it out to the last possible moment for an early May fight when Mayweather signed his Showtime deal and they announced Guerrero in 2013. The announcement was on Feb. 19,” Rafael said on his twitter.
That means that there are still a good 12 days to go before February 19th, and honestly the negotiations can probably go until March or April and it won’t matter. Pacquiao’s adviser Michael Koncz is already speaking about not needing a world tour, U.S tour or the HBO 24/7 and Showtime All Access episodes.
Koncz thinks the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight sells itself without any work put in to sell it. If Koncz is right, then it really doesn’t matter that the negotiations are dragging out a little bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV_qA9FF5qU
If all it’s going to take to make the fight a huge success is having the fight announced and letting the fighters meet at basketball games, then the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight is going to do quite well no matter how long the negotiations drag out.
You can make an argument that the negotiations could go all the way until May 2nd, and the fight will still do really well.
Would it be better if the negotiations were to be wrapped up now? Possibly, but we can’t know for sure. The interest in the fight will be so huge that it probably won’t matter. If they were to have a huge tour of the United States to publicize the fight, it would do well. But we’ve already seen Koncz saying that a large tour of the United States isn’t needed, so maybe Pacquiao wouldn’t be on board with a U.S tour anyway even if Mayweather wanted one.
While it’s an inconvenience that the Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations have been prolonged, it’s still won’t be fatal if the fight negotiations drag out another month.
If Koncz correct about the fight not needing any kind of tour, then the negotiations can extend another month or two without any problems without it effecting the fight.
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