By Chris Williams: It looks like we may have seen the last of promoter Bob Arum’s fights for Manny Pacquiao in Macau, China. Arum says he’s bringing Pacquiao back to the United States for his next fight – and likely his fight after that – in 2016.
Arum thinks that there is too much money lost through pay-per-view when he chooses to match Pacquiao overseas in places like Macau. Arum doesn’t say, but you have to wonder how much money was lost for the Filipino star by Arum staging two of his fights in Macau, China rather than in the United States?
I don’t think Arum is going to try any more of those experiments with Pacquiao now that he’s down to the wire and could be retiring either at the end of 2016 or in 2017. By having Pacquiao fight in Macau twice, I bet he lost out on a lot of money in U.S pay-per-view buys by staging those fights over there. Pacquiao should have spoke up when Arum first started talking about having him fight outside of the U.S.
“I like the United States. What are we schlepping around the world for,” Arum said to ESPN.com. “We had great deals in Macau before, but you lose so much of the [American] pay-per-view going there [because of the time difference].”
We heard the arguments for why Arum wanted to stage Pacquiao’s fights in Macau. Arum said that the tax rate was too high in the U.S for Pacquiao to be fighting there a lot. But if Pacquiao’s fights in Macau aren’t bringing in the same kind of pay-per-view green, then it doesn’t make any sense for him to be agreeing to fight in Macau.
Arum wants to open up the Chinese markets for pay-per-view, but thus far that’s not happening. I wonder if we’ll ever see that happening. It might take another lifetime before the U.S can open up China for boxing events that tap the huge population of 1.3 billion people.
There’s a potential gold mine there for Arum or any promoter that opens up China to pay-per-view. Pacquiao doesn’t have enough left in his career to be fighting a lot in Macau.
“Those deals are always built on sand, as they say,” Arum said about potentially staging Pacquiao’s next fight in Dubai. “We have plenty of interest in Las Vegas.”
If Arum really wanted to maximize the money that Pacquiao makes he’d stop matching him against guys like Chris Algieri, Brandon Rios and Tim Bradley. Those fighters clearly are not the guys that boxing fans want to see Pacquiao fight. They want to see him fight the bigger names like Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Miguel Cotto, Gennady Golovkin, Keith Thurman or Danny Garcia.
You can throw Amir Khan’s name in the list as well. Those are all good fights for Pacquiao that would make good green. Terence Crawford, Kell Brook, Rios, Lucas Matthysse and Bradley aren’t big enough names for Pacquiao to make the big money against them.
“Amir Khan I think is the best choice for the fans, and Brook is the second choice,” Pacquiao’s adviser Michael Koncz said to ESPN.com.
Khan is probably the best choice for Pacquiao if Arum can resist the urge to not put Pacquiao in with one of his Top Ranks stable fighters like Terence Crawford. I don’t think there’s any real question that Arum needs to match Pacquiao against for his next fight.
It’s got to be Khan unless Arum can convince Juan Manuel Marquez to take the fight. I don’t think Arum will be able to do that unless he gives Marquez a 50-50 deal, which I don’t think he would agree to do.
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