The Battle of Britain is officially fixed for Wales. Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua will stage their long-awaited heavyweight blockbuster in Cardiff on 11 December after an 11th-hour standoff over the venue that threatened to derail the encounter.
The agreement ends years of false starts between the former world champions and clears the way for one of the biggest all-British fights in boxing history. The undercard will take place on a Friday night, with the main-event ringwalks at the Principality Stadium expected in the small hours of Saturday morning – widely reported to be around 2am.
That is to accommodate a prime-time American audience for Netflix, which will broadcast it globally after its preferred plan to stage the fight at New York’s Madison Square Garden was scuppered.
The non-title bout will represent the culmination of a rivalry that has played out in fits and starts and largely from afar for nearly a decade, but securing the necessary signatures required one final round of brinksmanship between the parties.
While both fighters had initially agreed to a November date following their respective July tune-up bouts, the original contract stipulated that the fight would take place in the UK.
But Netflix, backed by the Saudi power broker Turki al-Sheikh and Zuffa Boxing executives, pushed for New York after expressing disappointment with the audience for Fury’s July fight in a UK-friendly time slot, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.
That preference became the ultimate impasse in the final negotiations. Eddie Hearn, Joshua’s promoter, resisted the proposed move to New York, seeking a contractual addendum to account for the heavier US tax burden. On Thursday, Hearn said the UK provision had proved decisive.
“If we hadn’t put that in the contract, which was a request from Anthony Joshua that the fight must be in the UK, we wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on,” he said. “This fight would have been in America.”
The dispute also drew in the UFC chief executive, Dana White. Fury welcomed White’s involvement, while Hearn opposed him serving as lead promoter, prompting an expletive-laden broadside from Fury. Thursday’s announcement said Al-Sheikh’s The Ring and White “will collaborate to promote” the fight, while making no mention of Hearn, Frank Warren, Matchroom or Queensberry.
Fury, 38, and Joshua, 36, remained on course for the lucrative meeting after winning against limited opponents on successive nights in July. While Joshua survived a scare in Saudi Arabia, Fury stopped the 46-year-old Mariusz Wach inside seven rounds in Thailand.
Both men are attempting to return to the summit of boxing’s prestige division after suffering two defeats apiece against Oleksandr Usyk, the unbeaten former undisputed heavyweight champion from Ukraine who relinquished his remaining world title belts in June but insists he has not retired. Fury has won twice since returning to the ring, while Joshua has spent the year rebuilding after his devastating knockout by Daniel Dubois in 2024.
Joshua (30-4-0, 27 KOs) held the IBF’s version of the heavyweight title across two stints from 2016 to 2019 and 2019 to 2021, making seven successful defences while also winning the WBA and WBO belts.
Fury (36-2-1, 25 KOs) first became the lineal and unified world champion y dethroning Wladimir Klitschko in 2015, before being stripped of the IBF title and later relinquishing his remaining belts during a 31-month layoff that saw him swell to nearly 28st amid public battles with addiction and bipolar disorder. The Manchester native completed an extraordinary comeback to hold the WBC title from 2020 to 2024, defending it three times successfully after ending Deontay Wilder’s five-year reign.
The rivals came closest to meeting for the undisputed championship in 2021, but the fight collapsed after a US arbitrator ruled Fury was contractually obligated to face Wilder for a third time.
Joshua subsequently lost his titles to Usyk, with several attempts to revive the Fury contest falling apart in the years since.
The bloom is inevitably off the rose. A fight that once promised to determine the world’s best heavyweight will instead bring together two former champions in their late 30s, each twice beaten by Usyk and closer to the end of his career than the peak. Incredibly, boxing’s long-suffering fans didn’t get it before GTA 6, yet the many years of thwarted negotiations and mutual ill will between Fury and Joshua have endowed the matchup with an aura compelling enough to eclipse its diminished stakes.
There was always something incongruous about an all-British affair of this magnitude finally playing out in New York rather than on UK soil, in front of the supporters whose loyalty and spending helped make both men global stars. Only months after hosting Taylor Swift’s wedding and the Knicks’ drought-busting NBA title run, the Garden appeared to have saved its least likely spectacle for last. But after myriad twists and turns, the biggest British fight that can be made today found its way back to where many felt it always belonged.
