The mega event between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor that was built up to be the biggest fight in combat sports history was a massive success on many levels, but it looks to have fallen short of the pay per view record set by Mayweather and Pacquiao in 2015.
Floyd Mayweather and UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor squared off in a boxing match this past August and gave the fans what they’d been asking for. McGregor was crossing over into a world that has historically looked down on mixed martial arts in an attempt to dethrone the boxing world’s pound for pound king, Floyd Mayweather.
In the end, the event was a great success and generated a lot of revenue for both Mayweather and McGregor, but fell a bit short of what both Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe and UFC President Dana White had both predicted.
“It’s different. It’s a totally different feel. There’s nowhere that I go, any of my team, definitely Floyd, where people aren’t talking about Mayweather-McGregor, This (expletive) is big. I’m not even gonna front. It’s big. People can downplay it and call it whatever they want. This is Big. BIG. ” said Leonard Ellerbe reporters during the Mayweather vs. McGregor press tour at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
“It definitely translates to the biggest fight of all time, the numbers are astronomical. This fight is a global fight. It’s a fight that the whole world is watching, the whole world is interested in. Literally anywhere I went it was the only thing people would talk to me about, I would go to promote another fight and people would talk to me about Mayweather-McGregor. It was nutty.” said Dana White.
However, the PPV numbers look to be just shy of the current record.
BoxingScene.com has the story.
“BoxingScene.com has learned that Mayweather-McGregor is expected to have generated approximately 4.4 million domestic pay-per-view buys and that an official announcement could be made as soon as this week.
That would mean that the highly publicized spectacle between boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Jr. and UFC superstar Conor McGregor, while wildly successful financially, didn’t break the pay-per-view record for combat sports. Mayweather’s maligned win against Manny Pacquiao still owns that distinction.”
