In what you would have to interpret as a negative sign, former WBA/WBC light middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s March 8th fight against Alfredo Angulo (22-3, 18 KO’s) still hasn’t sold out the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada despite having been on sale for quite some time. As you can see, there are still 2 thousand tickets remaining for the fight with a little less than 2 weeks to go before the bout. Considering that this fight is going to be sold on Showtime pay-per-view as well, this could mean that fight fans won’t be interested in purchasing it.
The red-headed Canelo is coming off of a huge PPV clash against Floyd Mayweather Jr. from last September in a fight that hauled in 2.2 million buys on Showtime PPV. However, picking a soft touch in Angulo, who is coming off of a stoppage loss in his last fight against Erislandy Lara last June, might not have been what Canelo needed for his first PPV fight to be a success in terms of bringing in a lot of money. This could be a painful lesson to Canelo and Golden Boy Promotions that you can’t just stick anyone in there with Canelo and expect him to bring in a lot of fans.
The Canelo vs. Angulo fight will likely sellout by March 8th, but if this was really a fight that boxing fans wanted to see, it would have sold out a lot sooner than that you would think.
In the future, Canelo, if he’s going to ask boxing fans to pay to see his fights on PPV, he’s going to probably need to face popular opponents that fans approve of. I’m sure that if the idea of Canelo facing Angulo was floated around to the fans for approval before Canelo made the decision to fight him, fans would have said no in overwhelming numbers to this fight. They would have likely told Canelo to fight someone like Lara instead or Gennady Golovkin. Those are the guys Canelo needs to be facing.