FLOYD MAYWEATHER was allegedly set to fight YouTuber AnEsonGib next month before his “greed” scuppered the deal.
The unbeaten American boxing legend, 45, was already set to show off his skills in the UK next month.
But his original bout against Liam Harrison was KO’d on Friday after the Brit suffered a knee injury.
Now Mayweather has announced he will fight Geordie Shore’s MMA star Aaron Chalmers at the O2 Arena instead.
However, YouTuber turned boxer AnEsonGib, who has a pro record of 1-1, was set to be his opponent.
That’s according to the Brit’s promoter Liam Chivers, who told Fred Talks Fighting: “We managed to get the venue and a couple of date options ready for them. I agreed Gib’s deal with the investors separately.
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“One of the big things in this business, believe it or not, people think TMT scam people, they didn’t pay Logan Paul… I know Logan didn’t have a purse but there may have been backend PPV that I don’t know about of which they may have just not paid him that I don’t know about as the costs off-set it.
“But I’m not going to take that risk with Gib, contracting with TMT and have them collect all the revenue from the seats and PPV and then hope we get our bit for Gib later. So it had to be through a third party with guarantees.
“We did all that hard work and we made that fight, Floyd approved Gib. We agreed verbally with Floyd and his team to fight Gib on that February 25 card and it was all set.”
Chivers then added: “Then Floyd got greedy. Floyd wanted too much up-front, there was a lot of risk up-front, and the discussions just dragged.
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“We were ready to sign this before Christmas but every day this goes on you just think the chances of it happening just go down and down.
“So, of course, he’s not going to pay for his team to assemble and Abdul to start his camp and come here to train.
“Then it came to the New Year and we heard from the investors that they had just completely gone cold on the idea.
“The time is too short now as we’d like to have built it up for at least a couple of months, make it big and allow Gib to do all of this promotional content that we have sold to them that he would do and they just weren’t getting on quick enough with Floyd.
“It came to the point where two weeks ago was our deadline, so we said that’s our cut-off, we are out.
“The investors were out and TMT said they would run it, so obviously they’re just going to take the pot of money and then you’d be re-negotiating with them for a much lower amount for Gib.
“We’ll try and keep in touch with the Mayweathers and something may happen in the future but the long and short of it is we didn’t like the financial structure of being contracted to TMT instead of the investors and having no control over anything.”
Source: Boxing - thesun.co.uk
