Eight days ago, a self-styled sporting superstar, propelled to his position by money, ego and extraordinary talent, took to the arena for a championship decider. Despite the millions of eyes trained on him and the hysteria drummed up by his billing, the superstar proceeded to put in a cagey, risk-free display. By the end, some spectators were so frustrated with the lack of excitement that they were compelled to jeer him from their seats.

Not that it mattered. The superstar wore his opponent down and, benefitting from some generous officiating, eventually secured the win he’d plotted all along. It might have been grim viewing, but the championship was his.

12 hours earlier, 5,000 miles away, Floyd Mayweather had taken to the ring in Las Vegas, defeating Manny Pacquiao on points to land a world title. Boos cascaded down on him as he made his acceptance speech.

The parallels between Mayweather and Jose Mourinho stretch well beyond the events of one weekend. Both are peacocking proponents of the PR game, both head up sporting ventures defined by extreme wealth and occasional infamy, and both feed madly off their persona as their sport’s bad guy (though it should be said that while Mourinho’s villainy is largely of the pantomime variety, much of Mayweather’s is far nastier).

But it was their tactical similarities that were highlighted most emphatically on a weekend in which the dismaying disparity between sport’s promotional promises and its pragmatic realities was thrust down the throats of millions of paying viewers.

Photo by Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

The point being blindly missed by those howling their disapproval at Mayweather’s tactics, of course, was that it was they, in allowing their expectations to be dictated by the booming hype machine of the preceding fortnight, who were the mugs here. Mayweather has always been a cautious fighter and wasn’t about to muck around with his finely-tuned winning formula for the self-titled Fight of the Century. Likewise, those shedding salty tears of anger at Mourinho’s reverential pursuit of a clean sheet at home to Crystal Palace had clearly not been paying attention to the past half-season, which he has spent transforming autumn’s suspiciously freewheeling Chelsea into the dead-eyed, T-1000-style winning machine that finally clamped its bloodless grip on the title.

Both men are living proof that great sportspeople don’t necessarily produce great sport, becoming leaders in their fields by mastering the methods of spectacle-crushing defence. Just as Mayweather has his shoulder-roll down to a fine art, Mourinho will never tire of using valuable seconds of stoppage time to replace a gifted-but-lightweight winger with John Obi Mikel. And just as Mayweather spent Saturday night bobbing and weaving away from his opponent, guarding fastidiously against punches while slowly implementing a process of arm’s-length asphyxiation, the defining image of Chelsea under Mourinho – both times – has been John Terry rising above the jostling penalty-box crowd, wincing his way through the pain barrier to head another incoming cross carefully into touch.

Chelsea’s inexorable win against Palace was part one of that weekend’s Super Sunday, Sky Sports’ weekly double bill whose unyielding thrills and unmatchable drama its creators never decline the chance to remind us of. Part two comprised of Manchester City chugging their way to their very own, very meaningless 1-0 win at White Hart Lane, spiritual home of the footballing letdown. And it was the previous week’s Super Sunday when the recent public antipathy towards Mourinho reached its frothing zenith. Chelsea’s visit to Arsenal, during which they extracted all excitement from the fixture with the cold precision of a dentist wrenching out a numbed tooth, was too much for many to bear.

It depends on your television provider, but in Britain a year-long subscription to Sky Sports costs somewhere in the region of £300. In February, the broadcaster cheerfully signed a cheque for £4.2bn in order to screen Premier League football for three more years.

On Saturday night, any American who wanted Mayweather vs. Pacquaio routed into their cable box was required to part with $99.50 – indeed, many were in the process of doing so when the fight was due to start, and so, naturally, the fight was delayed to facilitate an extra hour of pay-per-view sign-ups. Legally, tickets were sold for between $1,500 and $7,500, and some, rather less legally, for $350,000. If Gordon Gekko were to reinvent a sport in his image, it would look a lot like the MGM Arena in Las Vegas did on that Saturday night.

You don’t need to be trained at Bletchley Park to spot the correlation here. And the apparent lesson is that people are unlikely to part with eye-watering levels of buck without expecting a fair bit of bang in return. Similarly, when all their money has been funnelled into the pocket of the very person who’s decided to deny them their fireworks and, at the end of it all, that person stares at them through their TV screen, draped in silverware and wearing an expression of smug triumph, the paying customer is likely to feel a tad swindled. Some might even voice their boos accordingly.

Except that would be a slight misreading. It’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. The extra level of promotional bedlam that accompanied last weekend’s match-ups served to expose a slightly more interesting element to the process – and indeed one of the great paradoxes of modern-day elite-level sport.

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The fact is that these events, beamed as they are around the globe, are increasingly powered by TV money, which of course comes from TV viewers. In return for their cash comes the promise of thrills and explosions. The bigger the event, the higher the price charged, the louder and brighter the promised spectacle.

And yet for the sportsman, the bigger the event, the higher the price of defeat. And when the cost of a loss becomes so great, the most appealing tactic is the one that involves the fewest risks. The one that suffocates the spectacle, denies the drama and sneaks a 1-0 win at home to Alan Pardew’s Crystal Palace.

Viewers are promised excitement but excitement means the potential for either side to win, and both Mayweather and Mourinho have no time for such a notion.

It is no small irony that the jeers of last weekend’s fleeced onlookers in fact functioned to add an extra, unscripted layer of drama to the overblown theatre that had so disappointed them. Because the swindlers here were less the sportsmen, who were planted on the frontline to face the wrath of discontented crowds, but the whirring cogs of the media’s wild hype machine.

The treasures to be mined through the live broadcasting of these two sports has created a world governed by hyperbole. A world where every Sunday is Super and where a boxing match can be billed The Fight of the Century, with zero irony, when that century is less than two decades old. It’s a world where Sky Sports commissions a whole series of misty-eyed, soft-focus adverts for itself purely because they’ve hired a new pundit.

It’s instructive that the advert produced by HBO in the lead-up to Mayweather-Pacquiao carried literally all the hallmarks of a teaser for a Hollywood movie: the trumpeting of A-list names, the gravelly-voiced narrator, the vulgar tagline – the formula was adhered to with near-parodic precision. Jean Baudrillard wouldn’t have envisaged it in his wildest, wettest dreams. The arena which housed the fight was even named after a film studio.

In the event, HBO’s customers were promised Michael Bay but given Michael Haneke. And they were in no mood to drink in a slow-burn technical masterclass when they’d been expecting the frenzied joy of Nic Cage emptying his pistol into the baddie’s jolting torso. They wanted popcorn and were served pistachios.

They were right to jeer, because ultimately they had been duped. But their ire was misdirected. The only obligation of Mourinho and Mayweather was to themselves. They promised to win, and they showed that they are men of their word. Even if aesthetics are just an afterthought.