By Jim Maltzman: Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have officially started negotiations for a fight in December in Saudi Arabia. Fury’s promoter Bob Arum is waiting for what could be a lucrative offer to bring the heavyweight unification match between IBF/WBA/WBO champion Joshua and WBC champ Fury to Saudi.
Fury-Joshua will be for the undisputed heavyweight championship with all four heavyweight titles on the line.
There is still a long way to go before Fury vs. Joshua match gets made. First and foremost, Deontay Wilder and Kubrat Pulev remain as obstacles impeding the path of the Fury-Joshua mega-bout.
Pulev and Wilder need to step aside
They’ll need to agree to step aside to allow Fury (30-0-1, 21 KOs) and Joshua (23-1, 21 KOs). If Wilder and Pulev refuse to step aside, which is a possibility, then we won’t see the Joshua vs. Fury fight take place. It’s as simple as that. And the only way they’re going to move out of the way is if they’re given a HUGE step aside payment.
“Let’s see what type of offers we get from the Middle East,” Arum said to ESPN, “because there is a real frenzy with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, with the Emirates, to do events…It would be foolish for us not to consider those types of offers.”
The people that will lose in a Fury vs. Joshua fight taking place in Saudi are their loyal boxing fans. A lot of them won’t be able to make the trip to Saudi to see the battle. If the match takes place in December, the global pandemic could still be a problem preventing travel and work.
There will be a great deal of anger aimed towards the promoters for the Fury-Joshua event if it doesn’t get staged in the UK. The British fans have been supporting thee, two heavyweights, for their entire careers with their hard-earned money.
So how do Joshua and Fury’s fans get paid back? They have to travel to Saudi Arabia to see them fight. This fight will cost a top dollar and come at a time where one literally will be putting their life at risk by traveling.
In a perfect world, Fury and Joshua will agree to take considerably less money to fight in front of their fans in the UK. However, there’s too much money that the fighters could lose out on by not fighting where they can increase their net worth substantially.
Fury vs. Joshua makes more money in 2021
“There’s more chance at the moment that the bigger money could come next year because we don’t even know if we can do live crowds in November, December,” said Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn to ESPN.com.
What Hearn says about the Fury vs. Joshua mega-fight, making more money in 2021, makes a great deal of sense. Look at it this way. Many boxing fans are out of work right now. Where will those fans find the money to travel to Saudi to watch Joshua and Fury fight?
For a lot of fans, they won’t have the money to order Joshua vs. Fury fight on Sky Box Office or see it live in Saudi. If the organizers of the event wait until 2021 to stage the battle, it could help. In theory, there’s a better chance for many of the boxing fans to be employed by then.
Picking 2020 to sell the Joshua vs. Fury fight is terrible news because it’s coming at a terrible time. Can you imagine staging an event during the height of the black plague anywhere between these years: 1346–1353. It wiped out an estimated 200 million people, and it was pure misery.
As great as the Joshua-Fury fight is, it’s doubtlessly a wrong-headed idea to have the battle take place in 2020. However, if the pandemic experts are correct about the current situation lasting two more years, then things probably won’t get any better in 2021.
If anything, things could get worse beginning in the fall of 2020, with the sickness continuing to spread.
