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Everyone knows how eagerly the boxing world is waiting for the Joshua v Parker encounter on March 31 this year. The fight will happen at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, UK and all the 70,000+ tickets for the event have been sold out! The speed at which these tickets flew away is a good indicator of Joshua’s immensely growing popularity in the UK as well as other parts of the world!
While everyone’s eyes are on the Joshua v Parker encounter right now, it wasn’t long ago that the former beat the heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko in an excellent crowd pleasing bout. More than 90,000 fans witnessed that fight in the packed Wembley Stadium.
Thereafter, Josh was expected to fight Kubrat Pulev in the later part of 2017, however, Pulev had to be replaced by Carlos Takam, owing to an injury few weeks away from the scheduled fight date. The 70,000+ tickets for that event were also sold out in a jiffy!
The kind of superstardom and popularity achieved by Anthony Joshua over the past few years, and how his fights’ tickets get sold out each time, poses a very valid question as to whether he is the brand new cash cow of the boxing world?! Once Joshua-Parker fight has happened, Joshua would have been a part of three big boxing events that attracted over 230,000 people collectively to the venues. Boxing is considered one of the top two sports, alongside football, in the United Kingdom. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Joshua could almost fight anyone in the world and still sell a large number of tickets.
His only matchup in this regard seems to be Canelo Alvarez who had sold more than 60,000 tickets for his matchup fight against Liam Smith in the year 2016. In addition, there are some specific factors that come into play in case of Canelo, for example, most of this fights happen at the MGM Grand, Las Vegas, which can seat no more than 17,000 people. Whenever he has fought in other parts of the world, he has consistently drawn a large number of crowds. Furthermore, Canelo is also comparatively a better-known boxer than Antony Joshua, who has started posting big numbers only recently (in 2017).
Floyd Mayweather Jr, who retired some time ago, was boxing’s cash cow for a very long time. Most of his fights happened in Las Vegas too, primarily because that’s where he lived. Many wonder what kind of crowd figures Mayweather would have scored had he opted to branch out?
Manny Pacquiao is another big name that comes to mind when it comes to popular boxers. He has fought in multiple countries including China, Australia and US.
Joshua on the other hand is yet to literally go on the road and fight at locations outside of the United Kingdom. However, if looked at closely, he doesn’t actually need to. If one can generate the kind of numbers that he has been doing of late, he/she can pretty much call the shots regarding the fight’s location.
