MUMBAI: That Floyd Mayweather Jr. ended his illustrious career on a winning note after the most lucrative fight in combat sports history was no suprise. Sunday night’s biggest surprise was that his opponent Conor McGregor – an MMA champion making his boxing debut – made a match of it and the paying public got their money’s worth in a contest that went just under ten rounds before the referee put a stop to the battering the Irishman was undergoing.
On the count, Mayweather had finished off McGregor at the 65-second mark in the 10th round, barely under the 9.5 round mark, and thus finally ending his storied boxing career undefeated 50-0.
Afterward, Mayweather reiterated that he’d never fight again. “This is my last fight, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the crowd at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena. “Tonight I chose the right dance partner to dance with. Conor McGregor, you’re a hell of a champion.”
Once all the numbers have been tallied, the highly-anticipated bout is expected to break the record of 4.6 million pay-per-view buys set by the former five-weight champion’s fight with Manny Pacquiao in May 2015.
And according to the ‘Money Man’, it did just that.
“We broke all the pay-per-view records,” he said at the post-fight press conference. “You will never see me in the ring again. I wanted to break records and do different things. And tonight we broke the Mayweather-Pacquiao record for pay-per-view buys.”
Early estimates have the fight bringing in somewhere near $1 billion in overall revenue, with a purse set at approximately $390 million.
“We know that Mayweather is getting more however, with estimates ranging in the 70-75 (per cent) region,” Luke Brown of The Independent reported.
Assuming those numbers are right on the money, Mayweather would have received $290 million+ while McGregor, whose guaranteed minimum purse was $30 million, would be richer by about $100 million.
And it was not just from PPV that the money has rolled in. The Mayweather vs. McGregor fight was screened in theaters across the US, offering boxing fans an alternative to paying for the fight on PPV. According to Variety, the fight managed to bring in $2.4 million from just 481 theaters. To put that in perspective, that is only a little less than the $2.5 million that the Bruce Lee inspired Birth of the Dragon managed to pull in this weekend on 1,600 screens.
There are several reasons that Mayweather vs. McGregor managed to make so much money in so little time on so few screens. For one, there was an incredible demand to see the fight, which has been hyped for a very long time and is easily going to go down as one of the biggest sporting events of 2017. Also, tickets for the fight at most theaters, which was a partner venture between Fathom Events and Mayweather Promotions, were $40 each. Those who ordered the fight on PPV had to shell out $99.95 for the privilege of watching history in the making.
