Jake Paul watched Canelo Alvarez fight for the first time in 13 months, and before the cutman had packed up his Vaseline, Paul was on X doing his favorite thing in the world. He was poking a future Hall of Famer in public, for free, in front of millions of people.
“Out of the ring for 13 months but still the same old Canelo. Respect,” Paul wrote. Then came the little twist of the knife: “Did take a lot of punches though.” Then the sign-off, which reads like John Cusack holding a boombox over his head outside a window that has been closed on him for almost two years: “We will dance my friend, we will dance.”
The internet roasted him for it. GiveMeSport ran a headline saying Paul was being seriously mocked for the tweet. Good. Boxing purists can clutch their copies of The Ring all week. That mockery is fuel, and Paul has been running on it since the day he first laced up gloves. The way he keeps hounding Canelo is shameless, and it is the smartest promotional move anyone outside a Saudi boardroom is making right now.
What Actually Happened
Canelo, 36, beat Christian Mbilli by decision Saturday night to regain the WBC super middleweight title. It was his first fight since Terence Crawford outpointed him 13 months ago, so this was a legacy guy proving he still belongs. DAZN rounded up reactions from Crawford, Oleksandr Usyk and others. Look at that sentence again. Crawford, Usyk and Jake Paul, all in the same headline about a Canelo title win. One of those names is not like the others, and he got the most attention of the bunch.
That is the whole trick. Paul’s tweet is three sentences long and every sentence has a job. The compliment makes him look gracious and keeps him in the conversation. The jab about punches gives Canelo’s fan base something to be furious about, and furious fans click, quote and share. The promise keeps the fight alive as a story that never quite ends, like a sitcom will-they-won’t-they that refuses to get canceled.
It Was Close Once
People forget how near this thing came to happening. Bloody Elbow reported that the two camps held serious discussions at the start of 2025 and that the fight was a done deal before Canelo chose to sign a multi-fight deal with Turki Alalshikh instead. Most guys would have pouted. Paul just kept saying the name, over and over, through Canelo’s loss to Crawford and through his own disasters, and now through Canelo’s comeback.
I love a villain who refuses to leave the building. Paul is Wile E. Coyote with a marketing department, except this coyote has actually caught the roadrunner once before. A fight that got close enough to be called done has a way of coming back around when the money lines up again.
The Best Argument Against Him
The strongest case against Paul goes like this: he has no leverage. Anthony Joshua knocked him out and broke his jaw last December, he hasn’t fought since, and his comeback opponent for Dubai on Christmas Eve still doesn’t have a name attached.
Fair. Now check what happened in the same week. The 29-year-old announced a date, and within days Darren Till was publicly saying he’s waiting on a contract, while Tommy Fury and Chris Eubank Jr. got linked to the fight too. Picture a guy with a freshly repaired jaw and no opponent who still has a line of people angling to share a ring with him. That guy has plenty of leverage. In the prizefighting business, leverage means whether people care what you do next. They do. Even the people who hate him care, maybe the haters most of all.
Why Canelo Eventually Cashes It
Canelo is 36 and just came off a loss followed by a 13-month layoff. A multi-fight deal is still a finite number of fights, and every one of those fights brings him closer to the point where the smart business move is the biggest check left on the table. Purist approval doesn’t cover a mortgage. Paul has spent nearly two years making sure that when Canelo looks at that table, his face is the one staring back.
And that “did take a lot of punches” line is sneakier than it looks. Paul just planted a question that will follow every Canelo fight from here on, which is how much he has left. The more people ask that, the more a payday against a YouTuber with a broken-jaw comeback story starts to look like the kind of fight a veteran takes on his own terms, before the sport picks the terms for him.
You can hate the circus. I get it. But the circus keeps selling tickets, and the ringmaster is still out front with a megaphone yelling the same name.
Paul is back in the ring in Dubai on December 24 against an opponent he says he’ll reveal soon. If he wins, set your watch. The dancing tweets will start again before he finishes his post-fight interview.
