This Mayweather Vs. McGregor Ad Was Banned In U.K. For Being Offensive

One company evidently went too far in its attempt to benefit from last month’s Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Conor McGregor superfight.

Paddy Power, an Irish bookmaker, ran an ad leading up to the boxing match that included the phrase “Always bet on black,” a line a from a Wesley Snipes movie but also an obvious reference to the color of Mayweather’s skin. The rest of the ad read, “We’ve paid out early on a Mayweather victory. Because we checked, and only one of them is a boxer,” according to BloodyElbow.com.

This didn’t sit well with some folks who felt the ad was racist even though it hardly painted Mayweather in a negative light — quite the opposite, in fact — and the undefeated boxer supposedly gave it his stamp of approval. As such, the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned the ad.

Here’s ASA’s statement, via BloodyElbow.com:

“We acknowledged that the headline claim did not make a negative statement about Floyd Mayweather’s race and had endorsed him to win the match. We also acknowledged that Floyd Mayweather had authorised the claim. However, we considered that readers would nevertheless be offended by the invitation to always bet on the outcome of a boxing match based on a boxer’s race, and the message that the boxing match was a fight between two different races. For those reasons, we concluded that the ad was likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race.”

All told, Mayweather even wore Paddy Power boxer briefs to his weigh-in before the fight.