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Eddie Hearn has spoken of how a fight between faded, pampered and well-maneuvered British heavyweights Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua is the “biggest fight in boxing commercially”.
Fans outside the UK would rather see a real fight where Canelo Alvarez fights Terence Crawford, David Benavidez, Artur Beterbiev or Dmitry Bivol. These are real fights involving fighters still relatively close to their prime.
ESPN’s Mike Coppinger believes Canelo-Crawford is a bigger fight than Fury-Joshua. It looks like the fight doing 1 million PPV buys in the US alone, which it could do. It would certainly do bigger numbers than a Joshua vs Fury fight on PPV from the US. Still not the biggest fight Canelo would take. A match between him and David Benavidez would be much bigger than a Crawford one, but he doesn’t want to fight the “Mexican monster”.
So Crawford is the best we can get right now, and this fight is even bigger than the one involving ‘The Gypsy King’ and AJ. They both just lost. Daniel Dubois knocked out Joshua and Fury was defeated twice in a row by Oleksandr Usyk. In these sorry conditions, how are promoters like Hearn trying to push a Fury vs. Joshua fight on PPV, proclaiming it as the “biggest fight in boxing.”
Coming to Dud
People know what Fury-Joshua is about: money for them and the promoters. Trying to sell a fight between Joshua and Fury now at this late stage in their careers will not work outside of the UK.
The British will probably go there. They’ll probably want to see it in droves and will pay anything to see their old heroes trot once more in their golden years. US fans will NOT be interested, especially if the underdog is loaded domestically like the Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk 2 and the events Joshua vs. Daniel Dubois.
“Canelo-Crawford is way bigger commercially. Miles bigger. Will easily eclipse 1M US PPV buys at $80 (or thereabouts) and get a door over $20M. Sorry @EddieHearn Mike Coppinger said X.
Joshua-Fury would have been good a decade ago, but even then, it wouldn’t be big outside of the UK. None of these heavyweights fought top-tier opposition throughout their careers. Part of the problem is that AJ and Fury fought during a weak heavyweight era.
So they got to enjoy fighters like 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.
