This isn’t about Top Rank vs PBC. To some people what I’m saying will be obvious but this post is because I see a lot of people still focusing primarily on Crawford signing with Top Rank and being busy blaming Bob Arum. Most of us want this fight though so I’d like to shift things to something a little more productive. That is, how fan attitude affects how this fight happens.

Pressure on PBC or Spence is most likely to cause this fight to happen. Not on Top rank and Crawford because they already want it. Top Rank and Crawford have lots of reasons to want this fight, and Spence and PBC have plenty of other good/safer options.

Spence has the whole PBC stable of welterweights to fight, so now it’s Porter and then it can be the winner of Thurman-Pac, or Garcia Garcia. Or he can move up and fight J-rock, Hurd, or a Charlo. It’s cross network but he can get a lot more money immediately by taking a Canelo fight over a Crawford fight.

Both can lose a lot of image power with a loss over the other, but Crawford’s other options are bad. He can’t move up as easily as Spence could, he has a weak crop of welterweights easily available to him, his name is big but not huge enough to guarantee cross promotion fights (except for maybe with the other best WW, Spence) and he’s good enough to be too risky for most. If Crawford can beat Spence he stands to gain a huge amount of fame and image and can start to feel comfortable that he can attract other cross-promotion fights. This is all to say that Crawford and Arum both want Spence, because they basically need him.

So the only way this fight happens is if Spence or the PBC want it to happen. I don’t think they want it to happen, so as it is, this fight may never happen. But for how good a fight it is I don’t see a lot of demand for this fight. People love to instead mention that Crawford signed on with Bob and does it suck? Yes, but that’s already done and it’s too late now to do anything about that. I see people take the role of Spence’s financial planner and say stuff like “well Spence should get the belts first so he can be the firm A side” or even that Spence should avoid Crawford because he doesn’t make financial sense in terms of risk/reward (and because eww bob arum). I don’t know why this attitude is so big. We are fans of boxing after all, not fans of business sense. Just imagine saying in 2009 “Oh yeah, Mayweather shouldn’t want the pac fight right now. He should pursue a more lucrative path.” Or imagine if people just focused on the promotions instead of the fight itself. That attitude basically amounts to not demanding the fight, which definitely doesn’t help this fight happen.

So it may not really be fair to Spence but I like when I see people call him a ducker. Or at least I like it when I see people push on him over Crawford, since it helps imo. Criticizing Crawford is fine but it can’t make him want the fight more than he already does. Pushing Spence or the PBC is the only thing I think us fans can really do to help make this awesome fight happen.