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Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn has drawn a firm line over the proposed Anthony Joshua-Tyson Fury showdown, warning organisers that the long-awaited fight will not happen if they announce New York as the venue without first securing an agreement to move the bout from the United Kingdom.
The highly anticipated heavyweight clash has yet to receive an official announcement, despite earlier reports that Joshua and Fury had agreed to contracts for the contest.
The venue dispute centres on plans to stage the fight at Madison Square Garden in New York in November, with Hearn insisting that he and Joshua remain committed to holding the bout in the UK.
Speaking on The Punch Podcast, Hearn said the pair were facing pressure from organisers and Netflix to take the fight to the United States.
“Everybody wants to do the fight in New York apart from Anthony Joshua and me. We are under a huge amount of pressure, and we are being told by Turki Al-Alshikh and those guys that Netflix, in particular, really want to do the fight in the US,” he said.
Hearn acknowledged that the commercial interests of the broadcasters and organisers would influence the decision but said he disagreed with the arguments being made for a US venue.
“It’s like, ‘we are partners, we are paying a lot of money, you have to understand that we need to put the fight where we feel is, commercially, the best place’. I don’t agree with their arguments, but I am not paying the money,” he said.
The promoter revealed that organisers had informed him of their intention to announce New York as the venue, prompting him to issue a strong warning.
“The other day, they wrote to us and said, ‘just to let you know, we would like to announce the fight for New York’, and I said, ‘no, you can’t’.”
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Hearn warned that any attempt to announce the venue without an agreement with Joshua’s camp could result in the fight being scrapped.
“There might even be a situation where they go ahead and announce it, and you will probably see me coming out quite quickly to say, ‘no fight’,” he said.
He stressed that his position was not a negotiating tactic, insisting that Joshua’s camp wanted the fight in Britain.
“I promise you, if they announce that fight without an agreement in place to change the venue, there will be no fight, and we are not bluffing. We feel really strongly that this fight should be in the UK,” Hearn said.
According to Hearn, the strategy is to make the financial cost of moving the fight to the United States sufficiently high that organisers ultimately decide to stage it in England.
“We kind of want to say, ‘well, if you want to do it in America, you have got to pay us all of this money to change’, because we are not really bothered about the money; we want it in England.”
He added that the preferred outcome remained keeping the fight in the UK.
“We want to make it so much money that they just say, ‘you know what, let’s just do it in England’. That is our dream scenario,” he said.
The venue disagreement leaves the Joshua-Fury blockbuster facing another hurdle, with no official announcement yet confirming where the long-awaited heavyweight contest will take place.
