Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua

File: Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua

Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn has threatened to call off the long-awaited grudge match between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury should organisers go ahead and announce the fight for New York without first agreeing to move the bout from the United Kingdom, PUNCH Sports Extra reports.

No official announcement has yet been made for the fight, despite earlier reports that both men had signed contracts to face each other.

Fury returned to the ring for the second time this year when he squared off with Mariusz Wach, 46, in a low-key contest in Thailand, winning via seventh-round corner retirement, the night before Joshua made his own comeback.

In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, previously unknown contender Kristian Prenga twice floored Joshua in the opening round, only to be stopped himself in round two, a result that appeared to set up the Fury-Joshua showdown, which has been mooted to take place at Madison Square Garden in November.

Speaking on The Punch Podcast, Hearn insisted that he and Joshua remain committed to staging the fight in the United Kingdom, in line with their contract.

“Everybody wants to do the fight in New York apart from Anthony Joshua and me. We are under a huge amount of pressure, and we are being told by Turki Al-Alshikh and those guys that Netflix, in particular, really want to do the fight in the US,” he said.

Hearn added that he did not agree with the arguments being put forward by the American broadcaster, but stressed that the final decision would not be his to make, given the financial interests involved.

“It’s like, ‘we are partners, we are paying a lot of money, 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 am not paying the money,” he said.

The promoter revealed that organisers want to publicly confirm New York as the venue, a move he warned could collapse the fight entirely.

“The other day, they wrote to us and said, ‘just to let you know, we would like to announce the fight for New York’, and I said, ‘no, you can’t’. There might even be a situation where they go ahead and announce it, and you will probably see me coming out quite quickly to say, ‘no fight’,” Hearn said.

He maintained that any unilateral announcement without an agreement to change the venue would end the fight altogether.

“I promise you, if they announce that fight without an agreement in place to change the venue, there will be no fight, and we are not bluffing. We feel really strongly that this fight should be in the UK,” he said.

Hearn explained that their strategy was to make a move to America financially unattractive for organisers, in the hope that the fight would remain in England.

“We kind of want to say, ‘well, if you want to do it in America, you have got to pay us all of this money to change’, because we are not really bothered about the money; we want it in England. So, we want to make it so much money that they just say, ‘you know what, let’s just do it in England’. That is our dream scenario,” he said.

For now, an agreement over the venue appears further away than earlier reports suggested, with British fight fans hoping that Joshua and Hearn can convince Netflix that the United Kingdom remains the better location for all parties involved.