Jake Paul has admitted he’s been left upset by the fact that the pay-per-view sales for his boxing match with Anderson Silva last weekend didn’t do as well as he’d hoped.
“The pre-buys were going crazy,” Paul said on the IMPAULSIVE show. “Up, up, up. And on Wednesday, when the news came out about Anderson saying that he got knocked out or whatever, and the fight was in jeopardy, and all this press came out, the pre-buys tanked all the way down. The general public sees that and is like, ‘Oh, it’s not happening.’ Tommy (Fury) pulled out, Hasim (Rahman Jr.) pulled out, ‘Oh, Jake f*cking Paul can’t get an event together. This is done.’ It killed ticket sales. Boom, boom, boom, we’re still selling tickets that day. Everything went to zero. …
“I think it will probably go around 200 to 300K, which is kind of upsetting.”
So Paul is pinning the blame on Silva’s training KO story in the week before the fight, and that certainly won’t have helped matters.
However, perhaps fans are also just getting tired of the fact that he’s yet to fight an actual boxer, and instead opts to hand-pick opponents from MMA who are clearly well past their best.
In fairness, at least Silva was his own size and is undoubtedly a UFC legend, but at 47-years-old and with only one victory from his last nine UFC fights it’s hardly surprising to see that fans weren’t in a hurry to fork out $59.99 to see it.
