An undersized loudmouth disruptor arrives in Miami for a no-hope fight with one of history’s most destructive heavyweights, exploiting every available lever of new media to amplify his delusions of grandeur to mass audiences. There are mounting concerns for his mental and physical wellbeing, with doctors, commentators and former fighters openly questioning his soundness of mind and wondering whether he might end up in hospital – or worse. The oddsmakers have made him an 8-1 longshot, a price that feels almost charitable given the epic scale of the mismatch. The buildup revolves less around the favorite than around the smaller man’s mouth: his noise, his presence, and the creeping suspicion that spectacle may finally have outrun sense.
Cassius Clay wound up shocking the world back in 1964 when he made Sonny Liston quit on his stool after six rounds at the Miami Beach Convention Center. But it’s right here, on the eve of Friday night’s scheduled eight-round showdown between Jake Paul and Anthony Joshua at the nearby Kaseya Center, where those curious rhymes with the past come to a screeching halt.
It’s Christmastime on the neon edge of south-east Florida and everything old is new again. Paul, the 28-year-old American who rose to global fame as a YouTuber, has managed to develop into a competent club-level boxer since pivoting to the sport and turning professional in 2020, winning 12 of 13 bouts against a fleet of mostly faded mixed martial arts fighters, fellow YouTubers, a retired basketball star and a 58-year-old Mike Tyson – the last of which peaked at 65m live concurrent streams and drew an estimated 108 million average live viewers worldwide.
Joshua, 36, is an Olympic gold medallist and two-time unified heavyweight champion with an 89% knockout percentage who launched the first of his title reigns when Paul was still chewing scenery on the Disney Channel. He enters Friday’s main event looking to re-establish himself after a fifth-round knockout loss to Daniel Dubois in September 2024, and amid continuing discussions about a potential long-awaited bout with his fellow former champion Tyson Fury next year.
The contest has raised safety concerns because of the disparity in size, experience and pedigree. Paul weighed just under 200lb in his most recent bout, while Joshua, who stands five inches taller, has competed comfortably above 250lb. Despite criticism from regulators and fighters – there are questions over whether Vegas would have sanctioned it, much less the British Boxing Board of Control – the bout has been rubber-stamped and heavily backed as a global streaming event, with a nine-figure investment from Netflix. Paul and Joshua will each reportedly clear a minimum of $50m (£37.3m) for their efforts.
“People don’t like the fact that I’m fighting Jake. Whether that concerns me or not is another question,” Joshua said during Wednesday night’s final press conference, at a theater around the corner from where Ali brought Liston to heel all those years ago. “But if we look at the people that don’t want me to be here, but they want me to put an end to Jake Paul’s show, I understand it and that’s why I have to carry boxing on my back with this fight.”
Fistic purists may lament the state of things, but there is no sport better equipped to understand what is happening here. Long before anyone talked about algorithms or engagement metrics, boxing was the original attention economy, its value dictated not by merit or structure but by visibility. There were no league structures, no fixed schedules, no guaranteed paydays. A fight existed only if enough people cared to show up, and the fighters who mattered were the ones who could command a crowd.
The earliest stars of the prize ring were not merely champions but attractions. John L Sullivan, Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey became global celebrities in an age when the concept of celebrity itself was still in utero, their names splashed across front pages and their movements followed by crowds eager to watch them train. Promoters such as Tex Rickard and Doc Kearns refined the model, engineering spectacle through controversy, narrative and scale. Skill mattered, but drawing power mattered more. Fighters who moved the needle advanced; those who did not were left behind. Boxing did not borrow this logic from modern media. It helped create it, converting views directly into revenue long before the term existed. Today’s iteration is simply an older logic resurfacing in a louder age.
That logic has been on full display throughout a fight week like none other, the first with a designated content house where a platoon of creators have been cooking since Monday. What was intended as a routine promotional curtain-raiser on Wednesday instead became another reminder of how combustible the buildup has become. Joshua’s blunt framing of boxing as an occupation that carries the risk of fatal consequences drew sharp reaction across the sport, prompting withering criticism from Fury even as he remains a potential future opponent.
Paul has responded to sceptics in his usual confrontational register. Asked about fighters and critics who argue his bouts are not “real” – that a gentlemen’s agreement might be in play – he dismissed the claim as legally actionable slander, framing the backlash as both a compliment and proof that his presence unsettles the sport. He insisted there were no hit-and-giggle handshakes, no soft landings, and no illusions about what awaits in the ring, portraying Friday’s fight as a genuine confrontation rather than a contrivance. He defended his presence by claiming “no one’s done more for the sport of boxing in the past decade than myself”. He may be right.
The consensus among boxing’s chattering class is that it will go as long as Joshua lets it – a couple of rounds if Paul fights merely to survive, a couple of minutes if he fights to win – but it must be noted that a spectacular destruction may only burnish Paul’s brand. He’s spent the week rattling off his many jobs: a venture capitalist, a CEO, a boxer, an entrepreneur. But at heart he remains a YouTuber, that unique subset of celebrity whose defining trait is not being afraid to embarrass themselves on camera in pursuit of that one viral moment. The Oprah shot. There’s little doubt that Christmas will come early for the millions tuning in to watch Paul’s comeuppance, a proof of concept that boxing’s new normal is the same as it ever was.
