Why is Boxing so lucrative

ldoodle

Just been reading an update about the Pacquiao/Mayweather fight and the former has been offered a guaranteed $40m purse. Pay-per-view is set to breach $100m which Pacquiao is getting none of.

Even if the fight goes the full 12 rounds, $40m seems a bit excessive (equates to about $100m per hour). Considering they only fight once or twice a year, what's the reason for the high salaries?

Ian J

Supply and demand and most of the huge fees will be funded by television and huge profits will be made by all as it's still very popular.

DrWise

TV rights, and if you get them 2 fighting which i highly doubt, but it will be the highest grossing fight

at the moment as it stands highest grossing fight has been Oscar DeLaHoya vs Floyd Mayweather 120million$ i believe on PPV, boxing is lucrative, but id rather watch that than football 100%, and rather see 2 guys going full pelt at each other trying to win a title, than seeing a football match any day of the week

Deadringers

Not sure what the perfect technical reason for it would be but I can take a guess.

First off there are not many other sports that I can think of that you are purposefully trying to hospitalize the opponent with a crowd watching in such an intimate setting.

And on that note of harming the other man I guess it also comes down to they are getting paid to potentially have brain damage and other parts of their body messed up.

NorvernRob

It's purely because of the amount of money generated by these megafights.

Bear in mind that PPV prices are much higher in the US as well, $50-$60 a time.

A Mayweather/Pac fight would do around 2m buys in the US alone and maybe a million elsewhere. (I think De La Hoya - Mayweather did 2.4m and this fight would outstrip that comfortably) The Casinos pay a huge chunk of cash to have the fight there, then there's gate receipts, sponsorship etc and that's a huge stack of cash to share around.

It's like football I guess, you get right to the top of the tree and you're rolling in it, if you're at the bottom you have to take another job to support your family.

Ian J

I wouldn't mind betting that the viewing figures were much higher in the days of Cassius Clay / Muhammed Ali although PPV hadn't been invented then

Venu44

You obviously know nothing about the sport then.

Deadringers

care to elaborate?

emcor99

The "Thrilla in Manila" was in fact the first boxing PPV

NorvernRob

You can't compare free to air broadcasts to PPV though - PPV is what generates the cash.

Benn v Eubank in 1993 had around 16m viewers, but would have generated peanuts compared to a US PPV with 500k  buys.

Haye v Klitschko last year got around 15m viewers in Germany alone plus a lot of PPV money around the world, which is how they were able to be paid £20m (ish) each.

If Ali was fighting today, he wouldn't have as many viewers but he'd be a whole lot richer.