Eddie Hearn has talked about how the fight between faded, spoiled, well-managed British heavyweights Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua is “the biggest commercial fight in boxing”.
Fans outside the UK would prefer to see a real fight involving Canelo Alvarez going up against Terence Crawford, David Benavidez, Arturo Beterbiev or Dmitry Bivolo. These are real fights in which fighters who are still relatively close to their prime take part.
ESPN’s Mike Coppinger believes Canelo-Crawford is a bigger fight than Fury-Joshua. It looks like it’s gunning for 1 million PPV buys in the US alone, which could do the trick. That would certainly produce higher numbers than a Joshua vs. Fury PPV fight from the US side. It’s still not the biggest fight Canelo would make. A match between him and David Benavidez would be far bigger than 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. They both just lost. Daniel Dubois knocked out Joshua, and Fury was beaten twice in a row by Oleksandr Usyk. Under these miserable conditions, how are promoters like Hearn trying to sell a Fury vs. Joshua PPV fight, advertising it as “the biggest fight in boxing.”
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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 in their careers will not work outside of the UK.
The British will probably go for it. They will probably want to watch it in large numbers and will pay anything to see their old heroes run again in their golden years. Fans in the US will NOT be interested, especially if the underdog is loaded with domestic trivia like the Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk 2 card and the Joshua vs. Daniel Dubois events.
“Canelo-Crawford is much bigger commercially. Miles bigger. It will easily eclipse 1M PPV buys in the US at $80 (or thereabouts) and will pull the door over $20M. Sorry @EddieHearn,” Mike Coppinger said on X.
Joshua-Fury would have been good ten years ago, but even then it wouldn’t have been big outside of the UK. None of these heavyweights have fought top opponents during their careers. Part of the problem is that AJ and Fury fought during a weak heavyweight era.
So they could enjoy fighters such as Deontay Wilder, 40-year-old Wladimir Klitschko, Alexander Povetkin and Kubrat Pulev. When some good fighters finally appeared, like Martin Bakola, they wanted nothing to do with him.
