Those people in charge with tallying up the numbers are edging closer to a final, official number as far as how many buys the August 26 “Money Fight” between Floyd Mayweather Junior and Conor McGregor managed to pull in.
Earlier this week, Dana White stated how the fight had managed a staggering 6.5 million – worldwide – and now, Showtime’s Stephen Espinoza says that while it’s still too early to say for sure that Mayweather-McGregor knocked Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao off the top spot (4.6 million buys in May of 2015), “the record is definitely within reach.”
Preliminary figures released by Showtime PPV, as reported by The New York Times yesterday, show how the fight’s buy-rate is currently in the “mid to high” 4 million range in the US.
Reportedly, over 50 million fans may well have watched the fight in the US – that’s one in six Americans. Really a quite staggering success rate; one Espinoza says was achieved due to the “massive expectations” the fight had – expectations the Showtime boss says were matched.
“It’s a little too soon to be predicting a record,” Espinoza told The New York Times. “But the record is definitely within reach. I’d absolutely call this a complete success. This was a fight that had massive expectations in both the fight itself and in the business results. It lived up to those expectations in every respect.”
And in the opinion of quite a few boxing fans, Mayweather’s 10th round stoppage win over McGregor came in a fight that had more excitement and was better overall value for money than the largely dull, massively disappointing Mayweather-Pacquiao bout.
One thing everyone can agree on is this: Mayweather is the undisputed pay-per-view king of boxing. His fight with McGregor may well become the number-one in terms of P-P-V buys, while Mayweather-Pacquiao, Mayweather-De La Hoya and Mayweather-Canelo are also in the top four pay-per-view events of all time.
Mayweather, who says he has retired at 50-0, does so as a very, very rich man indeed.