Anthony Joshua vs Deontay Wilder has been given a lifeline after seemingly being on the brink of collapse. Saudi Arabian promotional outfit Skills Challenge – who had initially made offers to promote the event – were unable to raise the funds to put on the fight due to a switch in the Kingdom’s boxing landscape.
Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority – who is promoting Tyson Fury and Francis Ngannou’s crossover clash in October – is reportedly getting a lion’s share of the funding, leaving Skills Challenge without the financial firepower to make their mark.
However, according to Eddie Hearn, they have now received multiple offers to stage the fight in several locations across the Middle East. The fight was originally proposed for December and then January but with all of the palaver surrounding the event Hearn admits it is more likely to take place in either February or March.
He told Boxing Social: “I have one name – Deontay Wilder. I had a good conversation with Shelly Finkel yesterday. We want to make a fight. We received an offer, as did Deontay Wilder. Now, at the moment, we can’t move forward with that, but we do have other offers that have come in, and we have opportunities to do that in other locations.
“We’ll speak to AJ about a couple of offers that have come in and hopefully we can go straight into that fight. In the Middle East. We have to digest them, we have to speak to them about when the fight would take place.
“The original date was January, now there are talks of potentially February or March. Do we fight in December? One name remains the focus for the next fight and that’s Deontay Wilder.”
Joshua and Wilder have had fights fall through on a number of occasions in the past. The closest they came to getting a deal over the line was back in 2018 when both men were at the peak of their powers and held all four major sanctioning body world titles between them.
Wilder offered Joshua £41million ($50m) upfront to fight him but AJ rejected it on grounds that it ‘clashed with his partnerships’. Since then, offers have been floated around but they have never managed to get beyond initial talks until now.
Hearn recently disclosed that terms have been agreed between both parties for a fight next year and that they are just awaiting a site offer to help facilitate the boxers’ expected paydays.