Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn has threatened to call off the long-awaited grudge match between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury should organisers go ahead and announce the fight for New York without first agreeing to move the bout from the United Kingdom.
Eddie Hearn, promoter of Anthony Joshua, has stated that the fight will not take place in New York if an agreement on the venue is not reached.
"Everybody wants to do the fight in New York apart from Anthony Joshua and me," Hearn said on The Punch Podcast. "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." Hearn added that he does not agree with the arguments being put forward by the American broadcaster, but stressed that the final decision would not be his to make, given the financial interests involved.
Hearn revealed that organisers want to publicly confirm New York as the venue, a move that he warned could collapse the fight entirely. "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'. 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'," Hearn said.
Eddie Hearn and Anthony Joshua, who were supposed to face each other at Madison Square Garden in November, are now locked in a dispute over the venue of their highly anticipated showdown.
Hearn explained that their strategy was to make a move to America financially unattractive for organisers, in the hope that the fight would remain 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," Hearn said. "So, 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,"
Eddie Hearn has been promoting Anthony Joshua's fights for years, and has built a reputation as one of the most successful promoters in the boxing industry. With a long history of successfully promoting high-profile fights, Hearn has stated that he is willing to go to great lengths to ensure that Joshua's fights take place where they are most commercially viable.
For now, an agreement over the venue appears further away than earlier reports suggested, with British fight fans hoping that Joshua and Hearn can convince Netflix that the United Kingdom remains the better location for all parties involved.