By Dan Ambrose: It remains to be seen whether the September 17 fight between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and WBO junior middleweight champion Liam “Beefy” Smith will produce many pay-per-view buys, but the fight seems to be selling well in terms of ticket sales. According to Golden Boy Promotions vice president Eric Gomez, the fight has sold over 25,000 for the 80,000 seat AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya has already come out to say that he expects 60,000 tickets to be sold. That might actually happen if they drop the price in the last few days before the bout. If the tickets are discounted steeply at the last minute, they might get a large walkup crowd of boxing fans that didn’t pre-pay for the tickets.
“On call to hear from Liam Beefy Smith ahead of the Canelo-Smith fight. Makeawar [Eric Gomez] says already more than 25k tickets sold. #boxing,” said Dan Rafael on his Twitter.
De La Hoya thinks the Canelo-Smith fight will attract a lot of pay-per-view buys on HBO. He’s saying that it’ll bring in more than the 1.15 million buys that the Pacquiao-Margarito fight brought in many years ago.
I don’t see how the Canelo-Smith fight would do that many buys or even more buys than Canelo’s fight against Miguel Cotto last November, a fight which brought in 900,000 PPV buys. Why would the Canelo-Smith fight bring in more buys if the fans have never heard of Smith? If anything, Canelo vs. Smith will do fewer buys than the Pacquiao-Margarito, Canelo-Cotto and even fewer than the 600,000 buys that Canelo vs. Amir Khan brought in last May.
I don’t think the local fans care too much who Canelo fights when it comes to him fighting in Texas. Canelo has a huge fan base in that state, and they don’t seem to mind who his opponent is. Canelo drew a lot of fans in his previous fights in Texas against James Kirkland and Alfredo Angulo. Now he’s on the verge of attracting another big audience for his fight against Britain’s Liam Smith. This isn’t a household name by any means.
If Canelo vs. Smith is able to bring in 60K fans like De La Hoya is predicting, then surely a fight between Canelo and unbeaten IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin will fill the entire 80K AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. That would be impressive to say the least, because the biggest boxing event in the last six years in that venue was Pacquiao’s fight against Antonio Margarito in 2010. That fight brought in over 40,000 fans to see the one-sided contest.
“As for the future, I’ll let others do the talking, but I have always said that I fear no man, and when I feel my body is ready, I will take on anyone and everyone in the division that I am fighting,” said Canelo.
Canelo says he fears no man, and yet he’s not stepping it up to fight Golovkin or any of the other dangerous fighters in the middleweight division. It doesn’t quite make sense for Canelo to be saying he doesn’t fear any man and then he turns around and vacates his WBC middleweight title in order not to fight Golovkin.
Caneleo has likely lost a lot of fans by him choosing not to fight Golovkin this year. If the idea was for Canelo to let the fight marinate until 2017 or later, I think it’s a fail. I don’t think it works like that, because many of the fans see Canelo as yellow and he’s probably lost them forever. I don’t think the Canelo vs. Golovkin fight will be any bigger next year in 2017 than it would be right now.
If the idea is to truly let the fight between Canelo and Golovkin marinate for a year so it can make more money, then I don’t see that playing out like that. I think the money might even be less next year than it would have been had Canelo fought Golovkin while he was still the WBC champion before he made the unwise decision to vacate the title. If Canelo and Golden Boy decide to push the Golovkin fight back even further into the future, then I think it’ll end up eventually producing poor PPV results when the fight does take place.
First of all, Canelo will wind up getting beaten by someone again even if Golden Boy matches him carefully. He’s not good enough to be counted on to beat everyone he faces. We saw that in how badly Canelo struggled to beat Erislandy Lara, Austin Trout and Miguel Cotto. There are a lot of boxing fans that think Canelo lost all three of those fights.
Canelo might even lose to Liam Smith on September 17. You can’t count on Canelo to win, because he’s not good enough. Once Canelo loses again, then a fight between him and Golovkin won’t be worth much.