Gaby Penagaricano, the adviser for WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto, says that the rumor of Cotto receiving a $40 million offer to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr is false. There was no such offer made. On Sunday, there was a rumor that Mayweather’s adviser Al Haymon had offered Cotto $40 million to fight Mayweather next.
It was a crazy rumor because there was no way that an offer of that size would work given the huge $30 million+ that Mayweather typically gets for his fights. A rematch between Cotto and Mayweather wouldn’t bring in over 2 million buys like the Mayweather vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight, and it would be lucky to do more than 1 million pay-per-view buys, because a lot of boxing fans would likely not be interested in seeing a second fight between them.
Canelo is still the guy that Penagaricano is attempting to negotiate a fight with for Cotto. The date isn’t important, Penagaricano says. Cotto isn’t mentally wrapped up in fighting on May 2nd like Canelo is, so it’s unclear if the fight would even take place on that date even though Canelo has repeatedly said he was going to take the Mexican holiday dates back from Mayweather.
If Cotto decides he doesn’t want to fight Canelo on May 2nd, then Canelo will need to try and take the Mexican fight date in September from Mayweather.
“No, the information is false,” Penagaricano said to RingTV.com about the rumor that Cotto received a $40 million offer to fight Mayweather. “We did not get offered $40 million to fight Floyd.”
The Cotto-Canelo fight is still stuck on the financial part of the negotiations. This was the part of the negotiations that you could predict going in would be a major problem, because Canelo likely wouldn’t budge from wanting a 50-50 purse split, and even if he did move off that number, it wouldn’t be far. It wouldn’t be surprising if this keeps the fight from getting made.
With Cotto being the A-side, it’s natural that he’d want the bigger slice of the financial pie. He’s done more with his career, and he’s the more experienced fighter. It obviously takes two to tango, but you can understand Cotto if he decides he doesn’t want to get the much younger 24-year-old Canelo a 50-50 or even a 55-45 deal given the huge gap in experience and achievements between the two fighters.