Don’t be surprised if Conor McGregor vs Floyd Mayweather doesn’t break the PPV record.
As things stand, Floyd Mayweather’s ‘Fight of the Century’ against Manny Pacquaio holds the record for most PPV buys at 4.6 million. According to MMA Fighting’s Dave Meltzer, the highest Conor McGregor has reached was with his rematch against Nate Diaz at UFC 202, which drew 1.6 million buys.
McGregor is the biggest PPV draw in MMA history, whereas Mayweather is the biggest draw in the history of sport full stop. His fights against Oscar De La Hoya and Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez both surpassed 2 million buys.
Although his last fight against Andre Berto only just came in North of half a million PPVs, one would imagine him and McGregor joining forces to sell a fight would result in ‘Money’ smashing the record again.
Maybe, maybe not.
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Combat sports scribe Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports shared an interesting theory on the Anik and Florian podcast which suggests MayMac shattering the record may not be a dead cert. He reckons this fight might just fall short of the record and take a commanding second place.
“My prediction is no. I predicted almost from the first time that this got discussed. I said I thought it was like 3.75-4.25 million PPV, just below the record.”
His reasoning, firstly the Pacquiao fight had years and years of hype building it up, whereas this one came together pretty quickly in comparison. Also, that fight was really hyped up to be an exceptional display of the fistic arts by boxing writers, whereas they’re portraying this one as a squash match in favour of the undefeated pugilist.
“The reason why I don’t think it breaks it is this: Mayweather-Pacquaio, when that was being negotiated over all those years, almost every boxing writer, if they wrote about it, said, ‘It’s going to be a great fight. It’s the two best fighters in the world, the two best welterweights in the world.’ It just got that positive reinforcement for so long.”
“This fight’s not going to have that. Number one, it didn’t have that lengthy build-up, but the build-up it has, as I mentioned earlier, is that Floyd’s going to kill Conor. So I think there’s some percentage of people that will stay away because of that. As a result, I don’t think it hits the record.”
He’s not wrong about the coverage, but that World Tour and all those press conferences could be the X factor that propels McGregor to the top of the all-time PPV table alongside Mayweather.
