Saul “Canelo” Alvarez isn’t ruling out a potential future fight against UFC star Conor McGregor if he beats Floyd Mayweather Jr. on August 26. However, Canelo doubts that McGregor will be able to pull off a “miracle” upset of the 40-year-old Mayweather in their fight on Showtime PPV at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Canelo probably smells opportunity knocking if he can get a crack at McGregor. There’s a lot of money to be made fighting the UFC star, and there’s very little threat.
“If that miracle happens, then it’s a different conversation but I doubt it very much,” Alvarez said.
According to Mayweather, Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya was interested in making the fight between Canelo and Conor McGregor, and that he was hoping to make that fight before the Gennady Golovkin match. Mayweather got to McGregor and snatched him up for a fight, and he believes it’s going to be a fight that makes at least $1 billion.
We can pretty much forget about McGregor beating Mayweather. That’s not going to happen. De La Hoya and Canelo need to decide whether they still want to take the McGregor fight after he gets beaten. I don’t know how much interest the boxing and MMA public would have in a fight between Canelo and McGregor if the UFC star is soundly beaten by Mayweather. There might not be much interest in comparison to the Mayweather-McGregor fight. But even with a depleted audience, Canelo can probably still make more money fighting McGregor than he can anyone else other than Gennady Golovkin, who he is already fighting on September 16.
The worst case scenario for Canelo is him losing BADLY to GGG on September 16 in suffering a knockout loss or a one-sided decision defeat, and then McGregor also losing badly to Mayweather. I don’t know how much fan interest there would be for a Canelo-McGregor fight if both guys are coming off of bad defeats.
Canelo and Golovkin have had the bad luck of the Mayweather-McGregor fight coming 3 weeks before their September 16 fight. If you look around at the boxing public, most of the fans are talking about the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight instead of the Canelo vs. GGG fight despite the fact that Mayweather and Conor isn’t anywhere near as good of a fight in terms of competitiveness.
The casual boxing fans and the MMA fans don’t care. They’re still a lot more interested in seeing Mayweather and McGregor fight because they’re bigger stars than Golovkin and Canelo. Mayweather is the one that decided to stage the McGregor fight directly in front of the Canelo-Triple G fight. Mayweather has his reasons for doing so. He undercut the biggest middleweight fight since Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Marvin Hagler fight in the 1980s.
Whether Mayweather chose to schedule his fight against McGregor directly in front of the Canelo-Golovkin fight is unclear. What is clear though is Mayweather could make himself look bad if his fight with McGregor is just as boring as his last 2 fights against Manny Pacquiao and Andre Berto. Boxing and MMA fans could feel ripped off, again, if Mayweather produces another dud of a fight.
”Oscar De La Hoya was trying to get Canelo to tight McGregor before he went to fight Triple G,” said Mayweather to ESPN. “Oscar said Floyd Mayweather is not good for boxing, but I was good enough for you to fight to get your biggest payday. Triple G has to fight Canelo. I don’t have to fight Canelo. You already saw what I did to Canelo. I already did what I had to do.”
De La Hoya insists on calling the Canelo-GGG fight a real fight unlike the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight.
“We’re concentrating on our fight and our event. We have the real fight and the real event. I think the fans have recognized that,” said De La Hoya.