Manny Pacquiao isn’t done boxing yet.
He has a fight Saturday night against Keith Thurman for the WBA SuperWorld Welterweight title at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas and he even says that he still has a handful of years left in the ring.
But what will happen after the only eight-division world champion in boxing history hangs up the gloves?
His answer: owning an NBA team. Well, at least becoming part of an NBA ownership group.
In an interview with TMZ Sports, the 40-year-old Pacquiao said that he’s “thinking about that” when asked about becoming a minority owner in the NBA.”
“Actually, I own a league in the Philippines, which is so popular right now in the Philippines, the MPBL, you can Google it, you can search it on the internet,” Pacquiao said to TMZ Sports.
Pacquiao is a die-hard basketball fan, and owns and runs the semi-professional Maharlika Pilipinas Basketball League (MPBL) in the Philippines.
The two-year-old MPBL isn’t trying to compete with the country’s national and longest-running pro basketball league, the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA). Instead, the MPBL, which is rising in popularity in the Philippines, acts as more of a locally-based league with regional commercial and village, or barangay as its called in the Philippines, based teams along with commercially-based teams to secure home arenas and corporate sponsorships. It has local television partnerships with ABS-CBN Sports and Liga in the Philippines, along with Fox Sports Philippines on Monday nights.
An endeavor into the United States-based NBA would be the biggest he’d take on in his basketball life. Pacquiao once dabbled into ownership with a PBA team and played a few games professionally as well.
However, his business endeavors outside of the ring haven’t gone so great. After getting elected to the Philippine Senate in May of 2016 in his first retirement stint, he returned to the ring just six months later claiming in an interview with AFP that “boxing is my main source of income. I can’t rely on my salary as a public official.”
Celebrity Net Worth values Pacquiao at a net worth of $220 million as of 2019, with his biggest payday coming in his overly hyped fight against Floyd Mayweather in May 2015.
Should Pacquiao actually go after a minority stake in the NBA, he’ll likely be stepping into ownership groups with one of a few of the league’s struggling sides. Forbes has the Memphis Grizzlies, New Orleans Pelicans, and the Charlotte Hornets on the bottom of their NBA valuations list, ranging their current value between $1.2 billion and $1.25 billion.
