Canelo Alvarez will face is set to face unbeaten WBA light heavyweight champion Dmitry Bivol on Saturday, May 7.
T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas is the frontrunner to host the Canelo-Bivol bout, which will be contested at the light heavyweight limit of 175 pounds, but other venues are under consideration.
If Alvarez (57-1-2, 39 KOs) gets by Bivol (19-0, 11 KOs) and Gennadiy Golovkin (41-1-1, 36 KOs) defeats Japan’s Ryota Murata (16-2, 13 KOs) in their middleweight title unification fight on an undetermined date, Alvarez and Golovkin would fight again in a super middleweight championship match four months later.
Golovkin, 39, is committed to fighting Murata next. They were supposed to square off December 29 in Japan, but their 12-round, 160-pound title bout was postponed indefinitely due to an increase in COVID-19 cases in Murata’s home country.
Alvarez, a four-division champion and boxing’s biggest star in the United States, could earn as much as $100 million altogether from those two fights with Russia’s Bivol and Kazakhstan’s Golovkin.
The 31-year-old Alvarez also considered a profitable offer from Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions and Showtime for a fight with WBC middleweight champion Jermall Charlo (32-0, 22 KOs), which would’ve taken place May 7. Alvarez could’ve earned more than $50 million for facing Houston’s Charlo if their fight would’ve performed well on pay-per-view.
Haymon also discussed a September bout against former WBC super middleweight champion David Benavidez (25-0, 22 KOs) with Alvarez’s representatives.
Alvarez’s last fight – an 11th-round stoppage of former IBF super middleweight champ Caleb Plant (21-1, 12 KOs) on November 6 at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas – drew nearly 800,000 pay-per-view buys.
DAZN, which trumpeted “death to pay-per-view” when it boldly entered the U.S. boxing market in the fall of 2018, is expected to offer the Alvarez-Bivol and Alvarez-Golovkin fights on a pay-per-view basis through that streaming service. The price point for those two events hasn’t been determined.
The last three of Alvarez’s six fights on DAZN also were made available through traditional pay-per-view platforms. Though his successive victories over former WBA super middleweight champ Callum Smith, WBC mandatory challenger Avni Yildirim and ex-WBO super middleweight champ Billy Joe Saunders were offered through cable and satellite operators, those wins were streamed live on DAZN to its subscribers for just the cost of their monthly subscription fee.
DAZN streamed six straight Alvarez fights from December 2018 through last May 8, but the Guadalajara native chose to work with Al Haymon’s PBC and Showtime for the Plant fight.
–boxingscene.com
