Souring on Canelo Alvarez: Are The Fans Done With the Mexican Star?

Saul “Canelo” Alvarez turned 34 today, July 18th…and it’s been a long time since his stock has been this low.

The Mexican star may have headlined the biggest-selling pay-per-view thus far this year with reportedly somewhere between 500K and 550K buys, versus fellow Mexican Jaime Munguia on May 4, but there’s little question that Canelo stock is down.

The Canelo-Munguia number represents a continued downward trend when it comes to the unified super middleweight champ’s drawing power as a big-ticket pay-per-view star. In his bout before Munguia, for example, he generated between 650K and 700K buys facing Jermell Charlo. His numbers have been trending generally downward– with a couple spikes here and there– since his first bout with Gennadiy Golovkin in 2017.

And the future is not all that bright for his pay-per-view bankability, either.

In a boxing world that is demanding a showdown with consensus top contender David Benavidez, Canelo and his team are pondering a “next opponent” list that reportedly only has Chris Eubank Jr., Edgar Berlanga, and Jermall Charlo on it.

That’s a downer for boxing fans and even for all but the most fanatical Alvarez fans.

Boxing fandom is famously fickle. By the sport’s relatively quick turnaround nature, a fighter really is only as commercially viable as what he’s currently dishing to the public. And while Canelo’s 11-month run from late 2020 to late 2021– where he fought four times and unified all four super middleweight titles– was super impressive, this latest stretch, with the exception of this recent performance against Munguia, has NOT been all that fan-appeasing. What apparently lies in the future is similarly unappealing.

“You’re holding the straps hostage,” two-division former world champ Tim Bradley recently blasted via ProBoxTV’s Deep Waters. “I’m letting y’all know right now– Canelo’s got a yellow stripe running down his damn back! Yes, he does, people. You know what that means– he’s soft. Canelo is soft. Step up and face a real fighter in [David] Benavidez. Someone who has rightfully earned his spot, someone who wants that world championship that you have.”

“If he fights Eubank or Berlanga…bro, come on, man,” the ESPN analyst continued. “We’re not getting the best possible fight out there. We want to see the Benavidez fight.”

Bradley can be grating and fickle in his leanings, himself, but he’s delivering a message that many fight fans currently share. Despite a resume that is as deep as anyone’s in the sport today, the feeling is that the avoidance of Benavidez is so blatantly obvious that it borders on being a legacy-definer.

At this point, not facing Benavidez may be a move made out of spite by a proud-defiant Alvarez. The king doesn’t have to suffer over the whims of the regular folk.

As this writer put it just about a couple weeks ago:

“The problem is that Alvarez has taken a dislike to Benavidez and sports a real distaste when it comes to all the calls for him to fight the man. This 33-year-old version of Canelo is set on being belligerent in playing the boxing business game and using his box office leverage to call all the shots, especially when it comes to the challenges he chooses to take on.

‘I don’t need to fight anybody,’ Alvarez told media not too long ago. ‘I don’t need to prove to anybody anything…I don’t need to prove anything to anybody…It is what it is.’

Okay. But ‘what it is’ is bullsh*t.

And nothing’s likely to change at 34 with generational wealth in the bank and, admittedly, just a few fights left in a first ballot Hall of Fame career.