Eddie Hearn has spoken of how a fight between faded, pampered, well-maneuvered British heavyweights Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua is the “biggest fight in commercial boxing”.
Fans outside the UK would prefer to see a real fight involving Canelo Alvarez fighting Terence Crawford, David Benavidez, Artur Beterbiev, or Dmitry Bivol. These are real fights involving fighters still relatively close to their primes.
ESPN’s Mike Coppinger believes Canelo-Crawford is a bigger fight than Fury-Joshua. It looks like the fight is doing 1 million PPV buys in the US alone, which could do it. It would certainly do bigger numbers than a Joshua vs. Fury on PPV from the US side. It’s not even the biggest fight Canelo would do. A match between him and David Benavidez would be much bigger than the one involving Crawford, but he doesn’t want to fight the “Mexican Monster”.
So Crawford is the best we can get right now, and that fight is still bigger than the one involving “The Gypsy King” and AJ. Both men just lost. Daniel Dubois knocked out Joshua, and Fury was beaten twice in a row by Oleksandr Usyk. In these unfortunate conditions, how are promoters like Hearn trying to sell a fight between Fury and Joshua on PPV, claiming it as the “biggest fight in boxing”.
I am selling a Dud
People know what Fury-Joshua is – money for them and the promoters. Trying to sell a fight between Joshua and Fury now at this late stage of his career is not going to work outside of the UK.
The British will probably go for it. They probably want to watch in large numbers and will pay anything to see their old heroes trot once more in their golden years. Fans in the United States will not be interested, especially if the underdog is loaded with domestic level scrubs such as the Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk 2 card and the Joshua vs. Daniel Dubois events.
“Canelo-Crawford is much bigger business. Miles bigger. Easily eclipse 1 million US PPV buys at $80 (or thereabouts) and pull in over $20 million. Sorry, @EddieHearn,” said Mike Coppinger X.
Joshua-Fury would have been good a decade ago, but even then, it wouldn’t be big outside of the UK. Neither of these heavyweights have fought against top-tier opposition throughout their careers. Part of the problem is that AJ and Fury fought during a weak heavyweight era.
Thus, they were able to celebrate fighters such as Deontay Wilder, 40-year-old Wladimir Klitschko, Alexander Povetkin and Kubrat Pulev. When some good fighters finally emerged, like Martin Bakole, they wanted nothing to do with him.
