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Eddie Hearn has spoken of how the fight between faded, spoiled, well-maneuvered British heavyweights Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua is “commercially the biggest fight in boxing”.
Fans outside the UK would rather see a real fight between Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford, David Benavides, Artur Beterbiev or Dmitri Bivol. These are real fights involving fighters who are still relatively close to their prime.
ESPN’s Mike Coppinger believes Canelo-Crawford is a bigger fight than Fury and Joshua. It looks like the fight is for 1 million PPV buys in the US alone, which could do it. That would certainly bring in bigger numbers than a Joshua vs. Fury PPV fight on the American side. It’s still not the biggest fight Canelo would take. A match between him and David Benavidez would be far bigger than the one involving Crawford, but he doesn’t want to fight the ‘Mexican monster’.
So Crawford is the best we can get at this point, 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 defeated by Oleksandr Usyk twice in a row. Under those deplorable conditions, how are promoters like Hearn trying to put a Fury vs. Joshua fight on PPV, touting it as “the greatest fight in boxing.”
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 in their careers will not work outside of the UK.
The British will probably go for it. They’ll probably want to watch it in droves and would pay anything to see their old heroes slug it out one more time in their golden years. Fans in the US will NOT be interested, especially if the underdog is packed with domestic scrubs like the Fury vs. Alexander Usyk 2 card and the Joshua vs. Daniel Dubois event.
“Canelo-Crawford is much bigger commercially. Miles bigger. It will easily surpass 1 million PPV buys in the US by $80 (or thereabouts) and will pull the gate above $20 million. Sorry @EddieHearn,” said Mike Coppinger Ks.
Joshua-Fury would have been good ten years ago, but even then he wouldn’t have been big outside of the UK. None of these heavyweights have fought state-of-the-art opposition during their careers. Part of the problem is that AJ and Fury fought during a weak heavyweight era.
So they could enjoy fighters like 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.
