Pacquiao wants 60-40 split to fight Mayweather

Speaking with Lance Pugmire of the Los Angeles Times, trainer extraordinaire Freddie Roach says that Manny Pacquiao wants a 60-40 split in his favor to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. as talks continue and a fight seemingly draws closer to being made official.

Roach, in a telephone conversation from England, said, "Manny believes he should get a 60-40 [purse] split too, because he did better in pay-per-view than Mayweather this year. Manny's the bigger draw."

Roach is referring to the 1.25 million pay-per-view buys for Pacquiao's 12th-round technical knockout of Miguel Cotto on Nov. 14, compared to the 1 million buys for Mayweather's fight against Juan Manuel Marquez in September. Yet Mayweather's December 2007 bout against Ricky Hatton generated more pay-per-view sales than Pacquiao-Hatton in May.

Overall, Manny sold about two million PPVs this year between fights with Miguel Cotto and Ricky Hatton. Had Mayweather fought twice, I have no reason to believe he wouldn't have cracked a million both times. His fight with Juan Manuel Marquez stunned the boxing and sports worlds with its incredible PPV performance, and I think any opponent of equal or greater stature would have done another million with Floyd, too.

Nobody's getting 60-40 for this fight, and everyone knows it. It's not going to be 60-40 Pacquiao, and it's not going to be 60-40 for Mayweather. And it won't be one of those things that people always want, the "true prize fight" where they agree to 40-40 or whatever up front and the winner gets the remainder.

It's going to be around 50-50, maybe something like 52-48, and if it goes over 50-50, it'll be Mayweather getting the slightly larger portion, or the fight won't happen. Floyd's not going to take a lesser slice of the pie for this fight, because whether or not it's truly relevant in this situation, he drastically outdrew Pacquiao with common opponents Oscar de la Hoya, Ricky Hatton and Juan Manuel Marquez. All of those fights were before Manny Pacquiao became Manny Pacquaio, the guy whose name gets dropped in the middle of football highlights on SportsCenter, but from a negotiating standpoint, I figure that's going to be something Floyd and his guys stick to in a major way.

The LA Times article doesn't mention anything about the earlier report from the Philippines that Pacquiao won't fight until September, so there's no further word on that right now. We're still in the table tennis stages of negotiations for this fight. Back and forth they'll go, and eventually Bob Arum and Richard Schaefer will work it out and we'll have an amazing event on our hands. Honestly, it's gone much smoother thus far than I think anyone expected.