By Scott Gilfoid: Eddie Hearn’s flat fee $12.5 million offer made to WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder is not what he and his co-manager Shelly Finkel are looking to get for a big unification fight against IBF/WBA heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua. They want a MUCH better deal than that, which could come out to a split of nearly 90/10 in favor of Joshua if Team Deontay had agreed to it. Hearn is going to need to sweeten the pot considerably if he’s going to get Wilder to agree to a flat fee.
Hearn’s offer is believed to be an 80-20 purse split in favor or Joshua. Finkel is hinting that his counter offer will be closer to 60-40 for the Joshua fight, which he believes could bring in $100 million. Hearn reportedly thinks the fight will bring in just $40 million. The thing is, if he gets Wilder locked into a flat fee of $12.5 million, then if the fight does bring in $100M, Joshua would make a huge killing whereas Deontay would get very little in comparison. If Hearn wants to offer Wilder a flat fee, then he might need to offer him $40 million to get him to agree to that kind of deal.
If Wilder agrees to the $12.5 million, he would be getting just 12.5% of the purse for the Joshua fight. That would mean the purse split would be 87.5/12.5 in favor of Joshua. That’s almost a 90/10 purse split in favor of Joshua. That’s an insane split.
“That’s nice, since he offered us 12.5,” Wilder’s co-manager Shelly Finkel said to skysports.com. “He [Joshua] thinks that we’re only 12 and-a-half per cent of it?”
If Hearn is stubborn, and resists the idea of giving Wilder a 40% cut of the purse for a fight with AJ, then you can assume that he doesn’t want any part of letting the powerful American puncher anywhere near his golden goose Joshua. Look at the facts. Former WBO heavyweight champion Joseph Parker received a 33 percent cut of the revenue for his recent fight against Joshua on March 31. You can argue that Wilder deserves at least a 7 percent increase from the percentage deal that Parker received, right? That means Wilder should get a 60-40 purse split. The fact that Hearn and Joshua are offering Wilder only a 12.5% cut of the revenue tells you a lot about their desire for the fight. They weren’t offering Parker a 12.5 percent cut of the revenue. They gave him a 33 percent cut. They must REALLY not want to fight Wilder, and you can’t blame them. But it would be nice if Joshua and Hearn just told the boxing public that Wilder is too dangerous right now, and they don’t feel confident that they can win that fight while he’s still at the peak of his career.
The $12.5M offer isn’t going to get the job done for Joshua and his promoter Eddie Hearn of Matchroom Boxing. If those two seriously want to sign Wilder for a unification fight, they’re going to need to increase their offer substantially. What we don’t know is whether Joshua and Hearn really fancy the fight with the 6’7” Deontay. Just going on the current offer that was made from Wednesday, it would appear that they don’t want the fight. Hearn spoke of wanting to move on to make a fight between Joshua and WBA mandatory challenger Alexander Povetkin if Wilder doesn’t accept his $12.5 million offer. What was even more interesting is that Hearn wasn’t even certain that he would revisit the negotiations for a Joshua-Wilder fight until 2019, which means that Jarrell ‘Big Baby’ Miller could be next for AJ after his fight with Povetkin. This is all so predictable unfortunately. If it’s true that Hearn is Miller’s co-promoter, then it’s quite understandable why he would look to make a Joshua-Miller fight in 2018 rather than the more dangerous Joshua-Wilder contest.
””If he wants the fight, it will happen,” said Finkel. “I would offer him something that gives him both a guarantee and an upside. We are working on how to structure it. “We believe it’s a minimum of 60 [per cent to Joshua], probably closer to a hundred [million],”
The $100 million that Finkel is talking about for the Joshua vs. Wilder fight is far above the $40 million that Hearn is estimating that it makes. If Hearn is willing to forget about the flat fee for Wilder and just go on an actual percentage deal, then it won’t matter whether the fight brings in $40M. As long as the purse split is the 60-40 that Finkel is taking about, it’ll make him and Wilder more willing to sign for the fight. But just offering a flat fee to Wilder, it’s clearly a waste of time for Hearn. If the fight only brings in $30 million, then yeah, the $12.5 million flat fee for Wilder would be a swell deal. But if Wilder agrees to the $12.5 million flat fee and the fight winds up making $100 million, then it would be a huge bonanza for Joshua and Hearn. Wilder wouldn’t be able to share in a fair way with all the loot the fight hauls in.
Usually when two stars are fighting, the negotiations center on a percentage deal. Flat fees are seen more where there’s a huge power imbalance. Hearn is obviously going by how many more boxing fans that Joshua brings in for his fights in the UK. He’s been fighting in front of large crowds of 80,000 fans since his fight with Wladimir Klitschko in April 2017. Joshua also makes a lot more money for his fights in the UK than Wilder does in the U.S. However, Wilder has the WBC heavyweight title, and he’s incredibly popular in the UK. If Joshua fights Wilder, he’s going to likely bring in a lot more money than he normally makes. It might be even more money than what he made in his fight against Wladimir last year.
The problem is Joshua has a good thing going with his easy fights against guys that are below Wilder’s talent level. Joshua has been taking beating the guys that Hearn has signed for him, and that’s mostly been fighters like Kevin Johnson, Parker, Charles Martin, Wladimir Klitschko, Dominic Breazeale and Eric Molina. Joshua still has three guys that he can make good money fighting in sure thing wins against Alexander Povetkin, Jarrell Miller and Dillian Whyte. Once Joshua has those fighters out of the way, it’ll be harder for him to continue to make the good money against the scrubs that are left over. At that point, Joshua will need to fight Wilder if he wants to get the big cash, because I don’t think Tyson Fury will be ready anytime soon for a fight against Joshua. Fury probably won’t be ready to fight Joshua until 2019 unless he’s desperate for a payday.