The pay per view numbers for Mayweather-Berto are not good

Following his last pay per view with Manny Pacquiao in May which generated a record 4.6 million buys, you would expect Floyd Maywether’s next fight to average less than that. That is exactly what happened with his “final” fight with Andre Berto last weekend.

According to boxing maven Dan Rafael of ESPN, the buys for Mayweather-Berto were extremely disappointing:

PPV industry source on #MayweatherBerto numbers tells me they're very poor relatively speaking. 'Being generous is might hit 550,000 buys.'

— Dan Rafael (@DanRafael1) September 16, 2015

Kevin Iole of Yahoo reports the number is somewhere between 400,000 and 550,000 saying no matter the figure, it’s still very disappointing:

In any event, the result will be the lowest figure since Mayweather sold 325,000 while fighting Carlos Baldomir on HBO Pay-Per-View in 2006.

Iole says Showtime which produced the fight is not going to release the final figures. However, a Showtime executive points out that no matter who Mayweather fought after Paquiao would have been deemed disappointing:

“To a large extent, anything we did coming off of that massive May 2 event was going to feel like a bit of a letdown,” (Showtime Executive Vice President and General Manager Stephen) Espinoza told Yahoo Sports. “We didn’t have available a really compelling list of available opponents. There’s been a lot of speculation about a lot of things, but when you got down to it, there wasn’t really a long list of available guys and none of them were slam dunk established stories or really compelling storylines.”

In addition to the low sales, the live gate was at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas fell short of a sellout. The Berto fight was the last bout on Mayweather’s contract with Showtime. While Mayweather announced that he was retiring, boxing observers feel that there could be more fights for him looming down the road.

[Yahoo]