By Mike Smith: Saul Canelo Alvarez (51-1-2, 35 KOs) and Daniel Jacobs (35-2, 29 KOs) will start their three-city international news tour next week to promote their May 4 fight on DAZN at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The fight is already highly anticipated by the boxing public, who can’t wait to see these two warriors clash.
WBA/WBC middleweight champion Canelo will be looking to capture Jacobs’ IBF 160 lb title that he recently won last October in beating Sergiy Derevyanchenko to capture the vacant title. The IBF belt belonged to Gennady Golovkin until he was forced to vacate the title due to the International Boxing Federation wanting him to defend it close to the same date that he was planning on fighting a rematch with Canelo.
Canelo-Jacobs will be visiting the following cities on their international 3-city press tour:
– New York City on Wednesday February 27 This will be the start of the press tour.
– Mexico City, Mexico on Friday, March 1
– Los Angeles on Monday, March 4
As you can see, this is going to be a short International press tour. In contrast, the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Canelo fight that took place in September 2013 had a HUGE 11-city press tour that took the fighters to the following states: New York, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Georgia, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Chicago, Illinois, Miami, Florida, San Antonio, Texas, Houston, Texas, Phoenix, Arizona, Los Angeles, California, and Mexico City, Mexico.
They weren’t kidding around when they put the Mayweather-Canelo international tour together. It involved two huge stars, and it was worth it to visit those cities. It costs a lot of money to conduct the tours, so that’s likely one of the reasons why the Canelo vs. Jacobs fight will have an abbreviated tour instead of the lengthy one we saw with the Mayweather vs. Alvarez tour six years ago in 2013. After that fight, Mayweather and Pacquiao did things in a more economical way in having a small 3-city tour for their fight in 2015. The belief was that it was such a huge fight that didn’t need to promote it the way they would a different fight. That turned out to be the correct thing. But obviously the fight would have done better numbers if they had put some money into a large press tour like the Mayweather-Canelo fight.
Canelo is already a big star in the U.S, and for that reason there’s less of a need for big tour around the country to drum up interest for his fight against the 32-year-old Jacobs (35-2, 29 KOs). The fight is going to get a lot of the hardcore boxing fans involved as it draws nearer to the May 4 date.
The casual boxing fans unfortunately have likely never heard of Jacobs before, and for that reason they might not bother subscribing to DAZN in order to see it. That’s why it would have been better for Canelo and Jacobs to have put together a longer international news tour so that they could get the casual fans involved. If Canelo was facing a popular middleweight like Gennady Golovkin instead of Jacobs, then there would be less need for press tour, but that’s not happening here. Canelo already beat GGG last September, and he’s moved on to other fights. Canelo and GGg could face each other in the future if the Kazakhstan fighter doesn’t retire.