The much-anticipated fight between Canelo Alvarez and Caleb Plant will not happen, at least not on Sept. 18, as ESPN’s Mike Coppinger reports that the fight is “100% dead.”
The talks hit a stalling point earlier this week, with IBF super middleweight titlist Plant saying that the Premier Boxing Champions side had bent over backwards to make the undisputed championship fight happen.
We’ll probably never get some 100 percent unbiased, totally clear story either way, and there’s still a chance Canelo-Plant can happen down the line, but it’s clear now it’s not happening in September.
On that note, if Canelo wants to keep that date, they’ll have to move fast. The most likely option there would seem to be a fight with current 175 lb titlist Dmitry Bivol, which Bivol has said in the past is a fight he’d move down to 168 to take, so don’t automatically assume it would be a light heavyweight move for Canelo.
But while Canelo likes to fight on Cinco de Mayo weekend and Mexican Independence weekend, he also hasn’t actually fought on the September date since 2018, so it’s entirely possible we don’t see him again until later in the year. And if that winds up happening, there may be time to fix the deal with Plant and PBC and get it done for October, November, or December.
But we’ll see. On Plant’s side, he misses out on a huge opportunity and payday, obviously, and that stinks for him, but that’s just the way it’s shaking out for the time being. Whatever he does now won’t be near as big as whatever Canelo does now, because Plant just isn’t Canelo, but there are contenders out there and all that. He could hold back until the fall and maybe fight David Benavidez (who is scheduled to return on Aug. 28), a fight that a lot of people would like to see, even if it’s not a Canelo-level event.