Joshua and Fury are contracted to meet in the UK later this year but Netflix, and the fight's Saudi backers, want to host it at Madison Square Garden on November 20
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| Tyson Fury is due to fight Anthony Joshua(Image: Tyson Fury/Instagram) |
Eddie Hearn insists he will pull the plug on Anthony Joshua's fight with Tyson Fury if New York is announced as the venue without a change of contract.
Joshua and Fury are contracted to meet in the UK later this year but Netflix, and the fight's Saudi backers, want to host it at Madison Square Garden on November 20. But Hearn insists he and Joshua want the fight to be held at Wembley and is refusing to back down in the row.
"Everybody wants to do the fight in New York, apart from Anthony Joshua and me," he told The Punch Podcast. "We're under a huge amount of pressure, and we're being told by Turki Alshikh and those guys - Netflix particularly - 'Look, we really want to do the fight in the US.' It's almost not a 'please Eddie,' but like, 'We're partners. We're paying a lot of money. Come on, you have to understand that we need to put the fight where we feel is commercially the best place.'
"I don't agree with their arguments, but I'm not the one paying the money. However, we wouldn't have signed the contract if the fight was in America, so we have to have a discussion around that. Then you've got Nick Khan phoning me up from TKO and Zuffa, saying, "Come on, can we be involved?" And I'm like, "What? Why? Why would I let you be involved?" "Well, we think we can make the fight bigger," and blah, blah, blah.
"Okay, if you tell me some reasons why I should let you be involved... Are you going to let me be involved in the next Conor McGregor fight in the UFC? No, of course not. So what? But I'm also not stubborn enough to just say no; I'll listen. The other day, though, they wrote to us and said, 'Just to let you know, we'd like to announce the fight for New York.' I said, 'No. You can't.'
"By the way, there might even be a situation where they go ahead and announce it anyway, and you'll probably see me come out quite quickly and say, 'No fight.' Because I promise you, if they announce that fight without an agreement in place to change the venue, there will be no fight, and we ain't bluffing.
"We feel really strongly that this fight should be in the UK. I've also said many times that I want it to work for everybody. Turki is spending a lot of money on this fight, if you really feel that commercially you're going to be so much better off doing it in America."
- Martin Domin
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