By Chris Williams: The final pay-per-view totals are in for last summer’s big showdown between superstars Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor on August 26 on Showtime, and it’s now known the fight brought in a whopping 4.3 million buys. That’s a lot of green stuff for both fighters.
The buy total is the 2nd highest PPV total of all time, only behind the 4.6 million Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao hauled in for their massive 2015 fight on HBO and Showtime.
Showtime released the news of the Mayweather-McGregor final PPV numbers less than an hour ago, and Boxing News 24 is impressed.
With the PPV numbers now released, we’ll have to see if Mayweather wants to go back to the bank and take home another $100-200 million in a rematch with McGregor or a fight against someone else.
Mayweather-McGregor took place on August 26 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The fight was expected to bring in big pay-per-view revenue, but few thought it was possible that it could come close to equaling the PPV number of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight from 2 years ago.
The Mayweather-McGregor PPV numbers went far beyond the No.3 highest PPV of 2.48M buys for Mayweather’s huge fight against Oscar De La Hoya way back in 2007. That fight would have likely done astronomical numbers of it took place in 2017 with the way PPV is geared up with theaters tied into, and the different ways for the fights to be purchased now.
Mayweather-McGregor brought in over $600M. Mayweather is said to have walked away with $300 million and McGregor $100 million. Mayweather and McGregor could still bring in huge money in a rematch if they chose to fight each other again. Many boxing and MMA fans want to see Mayweather-McGregor fight each other again. They’re not greedy though. This was a one off type of event. They won’t come back for a second fight unless the fans really push them to. There needs to be a little more time before the fans start calling for the two to fight each other again.
Mayweather had problems early on with the 29-year-old McGregor’s size and unorthodox style of fighting. Once Mayweather figured out how to fight McGregor, he quickly adapted and started walking him down using what McGregor called the ‘Mexican style’ of fighting.
McGregor didn’t have a way to adapt to deal with that style, so he got tired and eventually was stopped in the 10th round. McGregor wasn’t hurt. He was just tired. The referee Robert Byrd didn’t want to see McGregor get knocked out in the clinical sense, so he stepped in and stopped the fight with him still on his feet.