In a sign that WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto will be taking on a lesser fighter in his next fight in December, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says that Cotto’s next fight will likely not be on HBO pay-per-view.
Arum notes that the pay-per-view numbers are down across the board among all the top stars in boxing, and he feels that Cotto’s December fight shouldn’t be on PPV. What that means, of course, is that Arum likely has a good idea about who Cotto will be fighting next, because if Cotto were facing the likes of Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez or Gennady Golovkin, he would clearly be fighting on HBO pay-per-view.
It’s quite possible that Arum is going to try and get former WBO welterweight champion Tim Bradley as Cotto’s next opponent in December.
Arum already mentioned that he’d like to out a Bradley-Cotto fight together for December, and obviously there’s no way Arum could try and sell a fight between them on PPV unless he was good with the idea of it bringing in low, low numbers. We’re probably talking 100,000 PPV buys or even less than that. With Bradley coming off a loss to Manny Pacquiao, and having looked terrible against Ruslan Provodnikov, who would pay to see Cotto fight Bradley?
“I don’t think it will be,” Arum said to Dan Rafael of ESPN. “I think we have to start doing more live premium television shows, so I don’t think this will be on pay-per-view. It would be on HBO. We are meeting with HBO this week in Las Vegas and we’ll be talking about it. We have to realize that pay-per-view, no matter if it’s boxing, MMA or wrestling, the numbers are way down. People aren’t buying the pay-per-view like they used to buy. You can see it in Cotto-Martinez.”
It’s not so much that fans are no longer buying the PPV fights like they used to, but rather a case where promoters like Arum are putting up a really bad product with the fights that they’re trying to sell.
In Arum’s case, it was a mistake on his part to ask fans to purchase Pacquiao vs. Bradley and Pacquiao vs. Brandon Rios, because those were dull fights that fans knew who the winner was. Rios had lost his previous fight going into the Pacquiao fight. For that reason, Arum should have known that there was no way that fans were going to pay to see that mismatch.
Rios was not a good opponent. The same with Bradley. He had a gift decision over Provodnikov, as well as his controversial win over Pacquiao from 2012. Why would fans pay to see Pacquiao fight a guy that he already beat? Fans will buy good fights in high numbers, but they’re not going to pay big money to see the retread fights that Arum has been putting on, and the mismatches. They want to see quality matches, and you can’t call Cotto-Martinez, Pacquiao-Bradley or Pacquiao-Rios quality fights. Those were all regular HBO/ESPN level fights, at best. The fact that Arum was willing to have those fights be pay-per-view was kind of sad, because it wasn’t putting a good product on the market for fans to buy.
It’s pretty clear though that Cotto won’t be fighting someone with a real chance of beating him in December, because like I said, if he was fighting a good opponent, Arum would definitely have it as PPV bout.