If Mosley-Mayweather Does < 1.5M Buys, Pacquiao Likely Dictates Terms To Mayweather

There is at least one report out (via The Scene and Kevin Iole of Yahoo! sports) that the early buy rate for Mosley-Mayweather is in the range of 1.1-1.2 million.

As I said on the thread dedicated to that topic, if -- and that's a big if -- that number holds up, it will represent a near-epic failure for Mayweather and Golden Boy Promotions (GBP).

We all heard the predictions of 4 million buys, or more. We heard the hype about this fight easily surpassing the 2.4 million buys done by De La Hoya-Mayweather.

This bout was the most hyped and promoted fight I can recall since, on first recollection, Hagler-Hearns. A fully rolled-out 24/7; "Who R U Picking?" all over the internet; twitter trending topics of "Mayweather" and "Mosley" on the day before the fight; the "Gladiator" commercial; numerous press and television appearances for each fighter leading up to the match; free viewing, I believe, of some portion of the undercard (a trick MMA uses); opening up and promoting, I believe, local closed circuit and theater viewings of the fight. Etc. This was the D-Day of fight promotions. No tactic, tool, or dollar was spared to make this thing an overwhelming success at a record-setting level.

As mentioned, such promotion costs a huge amount of money and puts a lot of reputations on the line to be able to bring back the kind of record-breaking return which was not only promised, but widely expected.

I personally don't buy the 1.1-1.2 million figure. Given the amount of effort put into this promotion and given that you had two incredibly well-known and -respected American PPV draws, anything below 1.5 million buys would stun me.

However, if this fight does end up coming in at fewer than 1.5 million purchases, Floyd Mayweather and GBP are not only going to take an incredibly-damaging hit to their reputations as promoters and draws, such an occurrence would open up the door for Bob Arum and Manny Pacquiao to effectively control any future Pacquiao-Mayweather fight negotiations.

Pacquiao-Cotto, a fight between two foreign-born boxers which had far less promotional push behind it than Mosley-Mayweather, did around 1.25 million pay per view buys. And that fight featured a fighter in Cotto who had been fairly-recently decimated by Antonio Margarito and who did not look particularly good in his previous outing against Joshua Clottey (Cotto won that bout via split decision).

If an all-out promotion the likes of which boxing and Pay Per View has rarely, if ever, seen is only capable of slightly beating a contest between two non-Americans which received far less attention, then Team Mayweather and GBP are toast in wanting to dictate terms to Manny Pacquiao. Their leverage will be totally gone.

True Boxing Armageddon, of course, would be if Mosley-Mayweather does fewer PPV's than Cotto-Pacquiao. If that almost-impossible scenario plays out, Bob Arum will be seeking to become Czar Of World Boxing, or something. He and Pacquiao, in such a circumstance, would almost certainly look to make Floyd Mayweather grovel in any negotiations.

What all of this means, should this preliminary figure hold up (and I doubt it will), is that the likelihood of a Pacquiao-Mayweather bout would become more and more remote, in my opinion.

Everything Mayweather and GBP did and said before and after the fight was predicated on them being able to force Pacquiao to accede to their demands, no matter how arbitrary or inane.

If the Mosley-Mayweather PPV buys, though, go the way of the Titanic after the iceberg, then all bets are off and the script is completely flipped.

Stay tuned.

 

I agree with this. I'm not willing to buy Iole's numbers at all, at least not yet. We are going to have to wait and see how this all shakes out.

 

:smoke