By Jeff Aranow: Former two-division world champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s next against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. on May 6 is viewed by a lot of fans as sad mismatch on HBO PPV. It’s matches like this that lack the drama needed to take Canelo’s career to the next level.
Canelo v. Chavez Jr. isn’t seen a real fight in the eyes of a lot of boxing fans. It’s not even sporting, because of how bad Chavez Jr. has looked in his last six fights. Canelo is going to likely destroy the very close Chavez Jr. on May 6.
The fight is seen as a business related fight to give Canelo a big payday without any risk involved in him losing the fight. It’s a fight that lacks drama on paper, and it’s not the type of fight that will increase Canelo’s star power in the boxing world, because Chavez Jr. is no longer a top fighter at this point other than with the World Boxing Council, who has him ranked at No.6 with their organization.
You can argue that this kind of match-making by Golden Boy Promotions is not helping Canelo become a more popular fighter with the casual boxing fans. The only way that Canelo increases his popularity from the Chavez Jr. fight is if the casual fans haven’t been following the sport closely enough to realize that Chavez Jr. is a huge 8:1 underdog in the fight.
Alvarez was seen by a lot of fans four years ago as being on his way to superstardom when he fought Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2013 in a fight that pulled in 2.2 million pay-per-view buys. Many in the boxing world expected Canelo to rebound from the loss to Mayweather and move on to become a huge PPV star that regularly was involved in big fights against the top talents in the sport. It appears that Canelo is losing his popularity rather than increasing it due to the soft-matchmaking being done for him by his management.
Canelo’s last two fights against Liam Smith and Amir Khan would seem to show that. The pay-per-view buys for Canelo have been dropping in his last two fights. While some boxing fans say they don’t care about a fighter’s PPV numbers, but you have to consider those as barometers for a fighter’s popularity. If you see a guy’s PPV numbers dropping like we’re seeing with Canelo, it tells you that the boxing fans are not interested in the matches involving that fight.
You can try and understand why the boxing fans are losing interest in Canelo’s PPV fights, and it could be a number of things. The fans might be thinking that Canelo is not the real deal. They could see Canelo as just a money maker type of fighter who is matched against mediocre opposition in order to generate money by facing opposition that has almost no chance of beating him. If that’s what is causing the fans to lose interest in Canelo’s fights, then it’s a serious problem that his promoters at Golden Boy are going to need to address if they want to keep Canelo’s star power from continuing in it’s free fall path downwards. That means that Canelo is going to need to be matched against Gennady Golovkin in September, and then in fights against guys like Daniel Jacobs and Jermall Charlo, It means that Golden Boy will need to resist the urge to match Canelo against fighters with limited talent to pad his record.
Will Golden Boy make this move to increase Canelo’s star power or will they continue to match Canelo against the over-matched opposition that we’ve been seeing him fighting since 2014?
The fans expected Canelo to become a bigger name by taking on the likes of Gennady Golovkin, Jermall Charlo, Julian Williams, Demetrius Andrade, and Daniel Jacobs. Canelo hasn’t been matched against any of those fighters. Instead, Canelo’s promoters at Golden Boy Promotions have chosen to put him in with Amir Khan, James Kirkland, Alfredo Angulo, Liam Smith, and Miguel Cotto.
There’s nothing wrong with Canelo being matched against Erislandy Lara and Miguel Cotto. Those were good fights. Unfortunately, those fights are not the norms for the type of opposition that Canelo is being matched against nowadays. Cotto is not doing anything with his career in terms of fighting relevant fighters, so you can’t even see another fight between him and Canelo being anything other than a business fight rather than one in which Canelo is facing the best. Cotto hasn’t fought since losing to Canelo, and now facing James Kirkland on February 25.
If the idea is just to put Canelo in fights where he can make PPV money without any threat of him losing, then we could be seeing more of these types of mismatches in the future. Golden Boy has positioned Canelo at No.1 with the World Boxing Organization at 160. There’s talk of Canelo potentially fighting WBO middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders in 2017 if Golden Boy can’t make a fight with Golovkin in September. Saunders would be another mismatch, because he’s not viewed as a good champion.