Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua sold out Principality Stadium in Cardiff in less than 60 minutes on Friday, Boxing Insider reported. The buyers knew two things going in. The main event ring walk is scheduled for 1 a.m., and not a single undercard bout has been announced.
That’s a stadium full of people agreeing to stay up well past last orders for two heavyweights and nothing else on the card.
Tickets went on sale Friday, Oct. 9, at 12 p.m. UK time (8 a.m. ET), according to Turki Alalshikh, who posted a two-day countdown to the sale on X. His post lists the fight for Dec. 11, streaming live only on Netflix, and tags The Ring Magazine.
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Who’s actually running this thing
Selling the seats was the easy part. Figuring out who’s in charge has been messier. Dana White has said over and over that he’s promoting the event. Eddie Hearn has denied it just as often. This week Hearn said White missed the opening press conference because he was contractually barred from attending, and that the two would need to sit down if White wanted to produce the show for Netflix.
White brushed that off when he spoke to reporters after Contender Series on Tuesday night. He said he skipped the presser because he hasn’t missed a Contender Series in 10 years, and he saw no reason to meet with Hearn at all.
“I am producing the fight. I am promoting the fight. I will be there at the fight,” White said. He added that he’d fly straight back to Vegas afterward for a UFC event, with his production staff on the same plane.
Hearn has dismissed the feud as childish. In an interview MMA Fighting summarized in a headline, he also said he doesn’t care whether TKO produces Fury vs. Joshua, and he called Zuffa Boxing’s start abysmal.
White’s own summary of the whole thing was a lot less complicated. The fight is finally happening, he said, and Joshua and Fury are both about to make an enormous pile of money.
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The fighters
Joshua has been getting help from one of boxing’s legends. Gaston Reyno posted a clip on X this week of Duran, the man they called Manos de Piedra, showing Joshua how to throw body punches.
Fury, meanwhile, came up in a different conversation this week. MMA Fighting, writing about Israel Adesanya’s plans to retire for good, named Fury among the boxing megastars who either hung on too long or never fully committed to calling it a career. Whatever you think of that, Cardiff just told everyone how much demand there still is to see him in there with Joshua.
The undercard is the next shoe to drop. No date has been set for those announcements, and the fight itself is Dec. 11.
My take is simple. Nobody in Cardiff paid for a co-main event, and nobody paid to watch White and Hearn argue over producer credits. Fans bought two names, a 1 a.m. walk and a lot of black coffee. The matchmaker filling in the rest of that card doesn’t have to sell a single ticket now, so he might as well book something wild. Put a couple of big, reckless heavyweights on it and let them warm up the building before Fury and Joshua walk out.
