It’s official: the long-awaited return fight between Oleksandr Usyk and Anthony Joshua will be televised live on Sky Sports Box-Office.
This news comes after Sky Sports won the rights to the August 20 fight in Saudi Arabia with a huge £28 million bid; this bid outdoing those that were placed by TV rivals BBC, BT Sport, and DAZN. We fans now await the pay-per-view price the fight will carry.
Joshua recently surprised plenty of people by leaving Sky Sports and signing a lucrative deal with DAZN. It is now understood that DAZN will begin televising Joshua’s fights after the Usyk return. As per a news article from Yahoo! Sports, Joshua, who signed a “long-term global partnership” with DAZN, is set to have his next ten fights televised by DAZN. As to whether or not Joshua will actually have another ten fights, well, that’s an interesting question.
Plenty of people feel Usyk will repeat his win over Joshua next month, and it will be interesting to see where AJ goes from here is he does indeed suffer a third career defeat.
Joshua fought for nine years on Sky Sports and now, for one more fight, his relationship with them will remain. For old-school boxing fans, it would have been great if the big rematch had been won by BBC, with it then maybe even going out on “free” TV. But the folks at Sky Sports have deep pockets and the closest bid to rival them came from DAZN.
Sky Sports can expect to pull in a huge number of pay-per-view buys with Usyk-Joshua II though – maybe even a million or more. This is the biggest heavyweight fight of the year and fans want to see if Joshua can dig deep and come back and win, becoming a three-time heavyweight champion.
Again, we fans now await the announcement of the Sky Sports Box-Office fee for the August 20 fight. Will it be £19.95? Or £24.95? £29.95? Or even higher still? We’ll know soon enough.
