Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya has high expectations for Canelo Alvarez’s next fight.
Cinco de Mayo weekend will feature an all-Mexican HBO PPV main event, as superstar Canelo Alvarez (48-1-1, 34 KOs) takes on Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (49-2-1-1 NC, 32 KOs) in a special 164.5 lbs catchweight attraction.
Canelo’s promoter is none other than former boxing great Oscar De La Hoya, who told ESPN Deportes (via BoxingScene) that he expects the buyrate for this fight to be “30 percent more than” Canelo’s November 2015 win over Miguel Cotto, which drew in 900,000 buys. If you do the math, that means De La Hoya is projecting just under 1.2 million buys for a fight involving an opponent whose last meaningful outing was five years ago.
Now to be completely fair, Chavez Jr. vs. Sergio Martinez did fairly well on PPV, with a buyrate of 475,000. When you consider that it’s Mexico vs. Mexico on Cinco de Mayo weekend, more specifically Canelo against the son of one of the greatest boxers of all-time, it may produce a pretty good final number. More than one million buys? Almost certainly not.
De La Hoya has made some … lofty, shall we say, predictions in the past. He pegged Canelo vs. Khan as a one-million buy PPV, but it didn’t even reach half that number. Canelo-Cotto, which as previously mentioned totaled 900,000, but De La Hoya thought it had the potential to do an incredible two million buys. When co-promoting Gennady Golovkin vs. David Lemieux, Oscar lowered his expectations down to 350,000-500,000 buys, given that this was a first-time PPV for both men. The event drew about 150,000. Golovkin’s promoter, Tom Loeffler, had much more reasonable expectations for success, but he’s also not Oscar De La Hoya.
Canelo vs. Chavez Jr. will cost $59.95 SD/$69.95 HD on pay-per-view. The fight takes place at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on Saturday, May 6th.