By Jason Kim: The July 7th fight between IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko and Tony Thompson is already sold out for their fight at the Stade de Suisse in Berne, Switzerland.

What’s amazing is that the Stade de Suisse has a seating capacity of 32,000, and it’s hard to imagine that 32,000 fans actually want to see this fight because it’s considered a huge mismatch. When you get out of Germany and Ukraine, you’d likely be lucky to get more than 3000 fans to come watch a fight between Wladimir and 40-year-old Thompson. But it shows how popular Wladimir is in those locations.

It’s too bad because he could be a lot popular elsewhere if he faced better opposition. For example, his last fight was against 39-year-old, 5’10” Jean Marc Mormeck last March in Germany, and the fight was almost unwatchable because of how one-sided it was. It looked like Wladimir was in the ring with a middleweight, because that’s how big Mormeck looked in comparison to Wladimir. But what made the fight even more difficult to watch was how often Wladimir chose to clinch Mormeck.

He looked to be initiating 10 clinches per round. That’s kind of the gold standard for a fighter that is clinching too much. When you get to 10 or more clinches per round, it’s basically a clinch each time there’s an exchange and that’s really hard on the fans to watch that kind of a fight.

Wladimir needs to think about his fans when he takes on some of these overmatched opponents. Since he’s fighting in front of 30,000+ fans in stadiums, he should at least go all out and look to let his hands go instead of grabbing them left and right in clinches. That’s one of the problem that has kept Wladimir from becoming hugely popular in the United States. He clinches too much. His other problem is his weak opposition. He should be working on fixing that problem instead of continuing with these types of fights.