The American boxing legend conquered his profession and piled up more money than he’ll ever be able to spend, but a sense of purpose in retirement has proven far more elusive

All told it could have been worse for Floyd Mayweather.

On Wednesday, the five-division boxing champion backed out of a planned New Year’s Eve fight with the Japanese kickboxing star Tenshin Nasukawa less than three days after he appeared at a downtown Tokyo press conference announcing the bout, claiming he was “blindsided” by the promoter regarding the magnitude of the event.

Mayweather said in an Instagram post that he had agreed to a three-round exhibition with the Rizin Fighting Federation, a Japanese mixed martial arts company, that was “purely for entertainment purposes with no intentions of being represented as an official fight card” and was “completely derailed by the new direction this event was going”.

That the fight was scuppered came as little surprise. Yes, there’s a surprising volume of money in Japanese combat sports at the moment, but how did Mayweather expect to generate even a fraction of the nine-figure payday he’s come to expect without the US pay-per-view revenue that type of windfall requires? At least last year’s circus with Conor McGregor involved an established combat sports star in the United States. Nasukawa may be a bright young talent, with perfect records of 27-0 as a kickboxer and 4-0 in mixed martial arts, but most Western sports fans had never heard his name until Sunday night’s shock announcement. Never mind that he campaigns five weight classes below where Mayweather last fought or that it was scheduled to take place on Monday morning in the United States. Somehow we were meant to believe the most calculated figure in the history of boxing would agree to a bout where the contracted weight, number of rounds, type of gloves and, crucially, the rule set under which the bout would take place were left unannounced?

And so Mayweather said he never agreed to the fight, a strange claim given less than 72 hours earlier he’d sat through the hour-long press conference in Roppongi Hills announcing it, posed for photos and shook hands with Nasukawa and calmly fielded questions from the mostly Japanese press.

The truth is Al Haymon, architect of the unorthodox financial model that’s made Mayweather the world’s highest-earning athlete, has guided the boxer’s lucrative career to what it is and the reclusive Harvard-educated lawyer was not involved in this decision. Clearly. The only member of Mayweather’s team besides the boxer himself to appear on stage at Monday’s press conference was Brent Johnson, the chief executive of something called One Entertainment and a relatively new face in Mayweather’s tightly knit inner circle. Johnson, who is primarily charged with organizing Mayweather’s international appearances, has not answered multiple phone calls, emails and direct messages for this story, no doubt preoccupied licking his wounds.

And so Mayweather comes away with a bit of egg on his face, a regrettable minor episode but nothing bigger than a footnote in the annals of his career.

Still, it puts a fine point on a broader concern.

Mayweather, who turns 42 next month, needs to find something fulfilling to do with his life. At some point you have to ask yourself: What is the point? How much money do you need?

For a while it seemed Mayweather was bound to follow in the footsteps of Oscar De La Hoya and leverage his popularity into a second career in promoting boxers, but aside from a few almost accidental successes (like Gervonta Davis and Badou Jack), his fledgling Mayweather Promotions company has consistently struggled to make an impact. It’s entirely possible Mayweather believed a partnership with a Japanese promoter would help him bypass the American market altogether and secure a global platform for his middling stable, but it didn’t take long for the concept to be exposed as half-baked.

I am not Mayweather’s accountant but I firmly believe the rumblings about the boxer’s financial insolvency are wildly overblown. One of the reasons Haymon is so popular among fighters is he helps them invest their money wisely. Haymon has helped Mayweather make smart investments in personal and commercial real estate since the first partnered more than a decade ago, enriching him with more money than he’ll ever be able to spend.

Where this is all leading, it seems, is a rematch with Manny Pacquiao sometime next year, which might not do the record-shattering business of their poorly received 2015 blockbuster, but will no doubt be a money-spinning affair and another nine-figure payday for both men. Pacquiao, who won a secondary welterweight title belt earlier this year, signed with Haymon last month and is expected to announce a mid-January fight with Adrien Broner next week. Should the Filipino senator make it through unscathed, a rematch that nobody asked for will likely be announced for May or June.

Mayweather, as this week clearly showed, still wants to fight. He’s spent more than two decades hacking the sport not because he was brash or cocksure, but because he worked harder than anybody else, from his impossibly rigorous training sessions to those famous 4am runs. Unlike so many of his fellow boxers who balloon up and down in weight between fights, Mayweather stayed in fighting shape all year round and could probably make the welterweight limit next week if he needed to.

It’s hard to switch that off. Mayweather’s has always been a deceptively monastic, substance-free way of being, one in contrast with the anarchic The Money Team lifestyle he sells on TV, but the man is, like other prizefighting greats before him, an addict: to the light, to the heat, to the drug of competition. He looks at the Pacquiao fight as one that he can’t lose based on being in the ring with him already and another easy payday, but money is only an excuse. What he really needs is something to do.

The Pacquiao fight, which feels even more inevitable after last week’s Japanese debacle than a week ago, is only a band-aid for the larger issue facing Mayweather: where does it all end? Sadly, the richest sportsman of his generation is finding that the Big Boy Mansion is his Xanadu and that no fleet of Bugattis and Maybachs is enough to compensate for what money can’t buy. He spent more than two decades atop his sport, climbed every mountain top and amassed enough fortune and glory for several lifetimes, but for Mayweather finding a sense of purpose in retirement has proven far more elusive.