Floyd Mayweather Ponders May 3rd Opponent

As the middle of February passes the question regarding Floyd Mayweather's next opponent still lingers in the boxing world. Time is running out as May 3rd approaches, however with still over ten weeks away Mayweather seems to be taking a page out of last year's book with a late announcement regarding who he will be facing as his next opponent.

Mind games has become a reputation the Floyd Mayweather has come to know all to well, especially when it comes to announcing his next opponent. Even when you think you know what Floyd is going to do there is always the lingering chance that he will shock you at the very last moment. So even though Amir Khan has won the mayweatherpromotions.com poll there has been rumors coming from very good sources within the boxing community that Mayweather has not yet decided on whether or not Khan will be his foe on May 3rd. 

Many think that Floyd Mayweather is just being Floyd Mayweather. They assume that Khan is, and always has been his May 3rd choice. The polls, the waiting, and all this other stuff about Maidana is just public relations scheming to keep the fans talking about his next fight. Mayweather is a very smart businessman. He knows that as long as they are talking it generates buzz even if it is negative. Even though an opponent hasn't been chosen by doing all this he has already started the promotion for his May 3rd fight. It's a genius idea.

There could be a bigger problem here though. Boxing fans across the nation have united to speak out against Amir Khan as a formidable foe for the pound for pound king. They have called him undeserving of the fight stating that he is 2-2 in his last four fights and his last outing against an old Julio Diaz was less than impressive. Mayweather's twitter account, along with Showtime executive Stephen Espinoza's, have been ridiculed daily on a possible Mayweather-Khan fight. Fans are stating they refuse to buy it, and with other PPV bouts coming up such as Canelo-Angulo, Pacquiao-Bradley, and Cotto-Martinez, they are willing to put their money elsewhere. This could be swaying Mayweather and his team away from a potential Khan fight.

When it comes to the UK depending on who you talk to it's hard to confirm how a PPV event featuring Mayweather would work as far as generating money for him. Most think that Mayweather wants Khan because of the PPV buys he would get in the UK. According to sources in the UK, Amir Khan has one fight left on his Box Nation contract. While subscribers pay a monthly fee for Box Nation, and are only asked an extra 15-25 pounds for a PPV fight(from what I've been told) then the buys in the UK wouldn't bring in that much more money. The biggest part of this though, Mayweather gets 0% of the money made in the UK on the fight. If all this is true then this provides a big problem for Showtime and Mayweather.

If no money is brought in from the UK the general consensus is that a Mayweather-Khan fight would do awful in the United States. Perhaps worse than the 875k buys that he did against Robert Guerrero last year (Or 1.1 million depending on who you believe). Not that 875k is a bad number. It's actually quite good. But considering Mayweather is guaranteed 32$ million, and this Showtime deal was likely done on the basis that he would do a minimum of 1 million buys in every outing, Showtime wouldn't be happy with a number lower than 1 million buys. They probably wouldn't be happy with a number lower than 1.3. 

If Mayweather is banking on what the American public wants then it's likely they are leaning towards Maidana considering he won every U.S poll including two of the biggest websites in the world, ESPN and FightNews. The problem is that if Mayweather reneges on his promise to allow the fans to choose his next opponent he'll likely get a backlash from the fans who he promised would let choose between Maidana and Khan. Considering Khan won his website poll, some fans would not be happy. However Mayweather never did say that his poll was the only one he would go by nor did he say if he would count his Instagram votes, where he first announced the poll to begin with. The clock is ticking, and an announcement is expected this week.