Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury are now expected to fight in New York following a long period of chaos, confusion, and conjecture about the showdown’s location, reports say.
Hopefully, the two British heavyweights would fight in front of British fans at a time suited to a British broadcast audience. That dream is now all but over, BoxingScene has been told by multiple sources.
The long-awaited all-British heavyweight battle has stolen the headlines since Fury returned in April, outpointing Arslanbek Makhmudov in London, and then invited the watching Joshua, 36, to agree to a battle.
Joshua, 30-4 (27 KOs), initially refused, stating he needed a warm-up bout beforehand. That came on July 25 when he survived a calamitous opening round against the unheralded Kristian Prenga in Saudi Arabia before winning by emphatic KO in the second. The day before, in Thailand, 37-year-old Fury laboured while stopping veteran Mariusz Wach in seventh round to take his record to 36-2-1 (25 KOs).
There has been relentless speculation about where the fight, expected in November, would land with British fans outraged at the possibility of it being staged on American soil.
Efforts to make the contest at London’s Wembley Stadium suffered due to requirements from the fight’s leading powerbrokers – Turki Alalshikh and streaming giant Netflix – that it must start no earlier than 2 am, local time, to boost global viewing figures.
The contest has been a long time in the making. Too long, plenty now argue.
The rivalry can be traced back to 2010 when the up-and-coming Fury, then only 21, told Steve Bunce that then-amateur Joshua had hurt him when they sparred.
Fury went on to beat Wladimir Klitschko in 2015 to claim the world championship, only for out-of-the-ring problems with drugs and depression to blight his progress. Joshua, in the fallout, would pick up the IBF title the following year before adding WBA and WBO belts to his collection by 2018, the year in which Fury embarked on a comeback.
By 2020, both were on top of the division and, for a while, it seemed like an all-conquering showdown would follow until Deontay Wilder scuppered the plans by triggering his contractual right for a third bout with Fury.
Joshua instead fought Oleksandr Usyk, losing his three belts in the process in 2021. Two years after Joshua lost the rematch, Fury himself would also lose two consecutive bouts to the Ukrainian king.