Boxingscene reported today that the long rumoured Ruiz versus Arreola fight will take place in April on Fox PPV in the USA.
Both of these fighters are coming off losses and haven’t fought since 2019 which wouldn’t be a huge problem if it wasn’t such a bad match up that is being shoved on PPV for seemingly no good reason.
Recent PPV’s PBC have done are stacked with talent and competitive match ups or at the very least the main event is a good fight however this PPV is simply terrible. It’s a fight between a top 10 fighter coming off a loss and a 40 year old washed up veteran who is barely top 30 in the division and to add insult to injury he lost his last fight.
Ruiz has never been proven to be some big draw and I can only think that he’s asking for insane money and putting it on PPV is the only way to pay for it. The only other real option is that someone that has no idea what they are doing has decided that Ruiz is a big enough draw to fight anybody on PPV even if its a complete mismatch. I think they’ll find out very quickly that this isn’t the case.
I don’t really care if the high up business executives lose money on this fight but I do care about the continued obsession in boxing of putting every fight possible on PPV and denying a large part of the public consistent good fights that may grow the sport. I thought we might be moving in a better direction with Oscar Valdez-Miguel Berchelt and Lomachenko versus Lopez both not being PPV but it seems we are back to the model of squeezing as much as they can from dedicated fans of the sport while getting ready to abandon ship when the sport starts to sink again.
Boxing Fulcrum 