Pound-for-pound boxing champion Floyd Mayweather generated a flurry of pay-per-view buys for his Sept. 12 fight against Andre Berto but failed to deliver a knockout PPV performance.
The event, which Mayweather won in what he says is his last fight, averaged around 500,000 to 550,000 PPV buys, according to sources. That’s well short of the 1 million buys that Showtime executives said the fight had the potential to generate and far below the 4.4 million PPV buys Mayweather generated this past May in his fight against Manny Pacquiao.
While Showtime executives would not confirm the PPV numbers, the company did say that it is satisfied with the fight’s PPV performance. The fight marked the last of a six-fight PPV agreement with Mayweather, a deal that featured the industry's two biggest PPV events -- the Mayweather-Pacquiao bout and the September 2013 Mayweather-Canelo Alvarez fight.
“We are happy with the performance of the September 12 pay-per-view event … we witnessed four entertaining fights plus a historic moment as Floyd Mayweather announced his retirement from boxing,” said Steven Espinoza, executive vice president and general manager of Showtime Sports. “In all, we couldn’t be happier with our partnership with Floyd Mayweather. In just two and a half years, across six PPV events, we generated more than 10 million domestic pay per view buys, totaling nearly $800 million in gross revenue. We set all-time pay-per-view records on two separate occasions, the second of which is not likely to be exceeded in this generation, and we gave fans a wealth of entertaining and compelling shoulder programming. In short, the Mayweather deal has far exceeded our expectations.”
