By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer is looking for an opponent for his fighter WBC welterweight champion Saul Alvarez’s next fight on September 17th after Alvarez was impressive in beating number #3 ranked World Boxing Council contender Ryan Rhodes by a 12th round knockout last Saturday night.

According to Dan Rafael of ESPN, Schaefer and Alvarez’s manager Jose Reynoso are interested in having former two time world champion Ricardo Mayorga (29-8-1, 23 KO’s) be Alvarez’s next opponent, partly because of how good of a job Mayorga does at building interest for a fight with his trash talking; but also because Mayorga fought well in a losing effort against WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto last March. However, Schaefer is concerned that Mayorga might ask for too much money to fight Alvarez, which would cause them to look in another direction.

In the Rafael article, Schaefer said “I know one name mentioned was Mayorga, but he and his promoter [Don King] might price themselves out.”

As Rafael points out, there’s really not too many good options right now for Alvarez’s next fight because Golden Boy likely won’t want to match the 20-year-old Alvarez with a really dangerous opponent for this, his optional defense, because he needs as much seasoning under his belt as possible before he starts taking on the tougher guys in the division. Alvarez won’t be facing his mandatory challenger Vanes Martirosyan until next year, so that guy is out. You can also probably count out the Paul Williams vs. Erislandy Lara winner.

Williams would be too tough right now for Alvarez, and Lara not worth it because he still hasn’t built up a big fan base in the U.S. Alfredo Angulo would be a decent fight, but he too lacks a big fan base in the U.S and isn’t well known among casual boxing fans. It would be more trouble than it was worth for Alvarez to fight him. The other champions Sergiy Dzinziruk and Cornelius Bundradge are still unknowns in the U.S. and Alvarez wouldn’t get much attention for beating them.

Top Rank fighters Mike Jones, Kermit Cintron, Miguel Cotto and Pawel Wolak would be good options for Alvarez, but it’s hard to imagine that Bob Arum will want to feed those guys to Alvarez and watch them get beaten. Obviously, Golden Boy would jump at the chance of putting Alvarez with Cotto, but it’s not a doable fight right now. Cotto has a fight coming up against Antonio Margarito in December and isn’t available to fight Alvarez in September even if Arum were to allow him to make the fight, which I don’t think he would after seeing how easily Alvarez beat Rhodes.

When you look over all the options that Alvarez has available to him in the division, there’s really not a lot of good fights for Alvarez other than Mayorga. Sure, down the road Alvarez can take on some of the dangerous guys like Angulo and Martirosyan, but it’s doubtful Alvarez will get a big bump up in popularity among boxing fans because those guys aren’t huge stars.