By Emilio Pereira
The supposed 1.5 million pay-per-view buys generated by the Floyd “Money” Mayweather vs. Miguel Cotto fight are great but not much more successful than Manny Pacquiao vs. Juan Manuel Marquez III which generated 1.45 million pay-per-view buys, and this is without a quality co-main event like Saul “Canelo” Alvarez vs. Sugar Shane Mosley. Canelo Alvarez is a star boxer from Mexico and Mayweather-Cotto took place on Cinco de Mayo (May 5th).
In other words, Mayweather vs. Cotto and Canelo vs. Mosley, together, in the same night, generated only 50k more PPV than Pacquiao vs. Marquez with no supporting cast to help sell the fight.
Since Canelo is a big draw with the Mexican people and the fight was on Cinco de Mayo a Mexican holiday, you could say he sold a good portion of the PPV buys. Take away Canelo and focus on the Mayweather-Cotto fight alone, and the real figure could be somewhat lower, maybe 1 million PPV buys were bought just for Mayweather-Cotto, and the rest were for Canelo?
In addition, the Mayweather vs. Cotto promotion was more costly than the Pacquiao vs. Marquez promotion. In summary, I would guess Pacquiao possibly received more income in his last fight than Mayweather did for his most recent one.
