Hearn: The next Joshua? There will be no one else

British boxing will never produce a star as bright as Anthony Joshua again, according to Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn.

Joshua (28-3, 25 KOs), 34, challenges English rival Daniel Dubois (21-2, 20 KOs), 27, at Wembley Stadium in front of an expected crowd of 96,000, the highest ever crowd for a UK boxing event. and if he wins, he will join a small group of fighters who won the world heavyweight title on three separate occasions that includes Vitali Klitschko, Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield, Michael Moorer and Muhammad Ali.

Joshua has attracted huge stadium crowds in the UK during a professional career that started after his 2012 Olympic gold medal triumph.

Sponsorship deals have made Joshua one of boxing’s biggest earners in recent years, and he is 16th on the Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid athletes for 2024, with earnings of $83 million, including $8 million from sponsors such as DAZN, Hugo Boss , Suntory, Under Armour.

Hearn insists no one will eclipse Joshua, who has revived his career after three title fight losses and reigned as world champion from 2016 to 2019 and then from 2019 to 2021.

An even bigger fight than Saturday awaits Joshua if he beats Dubois, against English rival and fellow former champion Tyson Fury (34-1-1, 24 KOs), 36, who faces Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk (22-0, 14 KOs ), 37 , in a rematch on 21 December.

Hearn, who has promoted Joshua throughout his professional career, told Boxing Writers: “I get asked a lot, who’s the next AJ, and to be honest, you’re never going to see one. AJ won gold at the London Olympics and had a great start of profile building, and he has been a phenomenon that will never be repeated in my opinion.

“We’ve got a good crop coming. Johnny Fisher is a diamond in the rough, somebody who’s crossing over without an Olympic background and who’s already crossing over into the mainstream media. Pat Brown, Conner Tudsbury, Dalton Smith, it’ll be interesting to see them come through, Ben Whittaker is definitely someone who could look good and Conor Benn’s return will be huge.

“Outside of AJ and Fury, Conor Benn’s profile is miles bigger than all of them. We have to keep building stars but I don’t think we’ll have another one anywhere near Anthony Joshua.

“If you go back to the days [James] DeGale, [Kell] Stream, [Amir] Khan, they didn’t sell out Tottenham or Wembley. It’s not that we don’t have the stars anymore, it’s just that we compare it to AJ and Fury. But AJ and Fury are a phenomenon.”

The last time an event of Saturday’s magnitude took place in a British arena was when Tyson Fury’s stoppage victory over Derek Chisora ​​in a world heavyweight title defense was watched by almost 60,000 across north London at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in December 2022.

Since Fury’s last world championship, the landscape of boxing has changed.

Big fights are no longer exclusive to the usual venues of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York City, London, Manchester and Tokyo. Many of boxing’s biggest nights are now in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia following the Gulf nation’s rapid rise as a boxing superpower.

Riyadh Season – an annual state-run sports and entertainment festival that attracts sponsorship from some of the region’s most prominent companies – kicks off in October in the Saudi capital. Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, is the key figure in deciding which fights are staged at Riyadh events in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

But with Saudi Arabia hosting more major events, it means that fights that would normally have taken place in British arenas now take place in Riyadh on bills that feature fights good enough to headline events in their own right.

Riyadh Season has also taken the shows beyond Saudi Arabia; first in Los Angeles last month, in a show headlined by Terence Crawford, and now this weekend. Hearn admits events in Saudi Arabia have led to his company Matchroom working on an update to how they produce boxing events in the UK in the future.

“We are very funny [in boxing] because with the Riyadh season I see some of the responses say “I don’t think October 12th is such a good show.” We [Matchroom] can’t compete with the Riyadh Season, it’s something we’ve never seen before,” Hearn said.

“Every fighter at the moment wants to be a part of the Riyadh season and land that big pay check so it’s hard to get these fights to headline in the UK and the purses have gone through the roof for a select group of fighters. Unfortunately, the select few and their managers know what he got and what he got and say ‘yes he got it for fighting in Riyadh’ but it’s a bit different in Birmingham or Manchester it’s quite a difficult time.

“We will look at the schedule from 2025 and do things a little bit differently, it could be the fights or the way we do shows, the type of fights. We will never compete with the Riyadh season in terms of depth. So we have to add something new , kind of fighting and not being addressed by a manager, agent or advisor. It doesn’t work like that anymore, the speed of the shows and the times It’s time to refresh the product.”

There are some potential match-ups for UK stadium events in 2025: Benn v Chris Eubank Jr (if welterweight Benn is successful in his legal battle to have his ban lifted); Joshua vs. Fury/Usyk, or Dubois vs. Fury; and possibly the second part of Hearn vs. his rival British promoter Frank Warren, which would see five fighters from each promotional stable face each other to determine the best of five.

Joshua Buatsi, who fights Willy Hutchinson for the WBO interim world light heavyweight title in perhaps the biggest second bout on Saturday at Wembley, insists the Riyadh season has been a positive development for boxing, even if it means his career-defining bouts may take place in Saudi Arabia rather than his native London.

“We’re seeing fights that we would never have seen made and promoters are working together now,” Buatsi told ESPN.

“I never thought I’d see any promoters laughing and joking together like I saw at ringside recently. So whatever His Excellency [Turki Alalshikh] do, it works. Fights happen that we want to see and that’s the angle I’m looking at. It is good for boxing. Instead of fighting always being in Saudi Arabia, they’ve just done one in Los Angeles, this one in London and there’s talk of one in China, so really we should be optimistic.”

Warren, who promotes Dubois and has been a boxing promoter since the 1980s, agrees with Buatsi.

“When I was younger you had Rumble in the Jungle, Thriller in Manilla, Drama in the Bahamas [all featuring Muhammad Ali] and Mike Tyson fought [Buster Douglas] in Japan, Warren told ESPN.

“Big fights have always happened all over the world because fighters go there for the money. For British fans it’s good because the fights take place earlier in the evening, rather than 4 or 5 in the morning when they’re in Vegas. And we still do big fights in the UK, and you’ve got two Riyadh season fights taking place in LA and London in a few weeks.”