WE LAMENT NO longer football’s ‘international breaks’ but the vast Premier League windows between them.
Troy Parrott’s winner in Budapest engendered an explosion of joy so pure that its ripples touched lands far beyond Ireland. Consumed by millions through social media, it emphasised the degree to which international football — at least in the years between its curtsies to despots — now provides refuge from a top-level club equivalent that continues to drift away from its people into orbit, its tethers gnawed loose by greedy pigs long ago.
Parrott and Ireland elevated us on Sunday afternoon to a plane we rarely get to visit; one on which adults revert to giddy, flailing, innocent kids, and one on which their kids begin to believe that they can bring us all back there when they grow up.
It felt prescient to cling to such an antidotal, communal upswing. And the moment felt all the more precious a day later, when boxing’s Problem Child darkened our door with its very antithesis.
Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua. Ah, bollocks.
Depressing was the reality that the announcement of this heavyweight fight on 19 December didn’t even feel surreal. Scarcely believable is that 2017, the year in which Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor’s ruse paved the way for the ensuing slew of freak-show fights, actually feels like a more innocent time now: the humble boxing writer was given the leeway to ignore Mayweather-McGregor but fights of its ilk have become so commonplace in the intervening years that to turn a blind eye to them feels like a dereliction of responsibility.
Jake Paul in action against Julio Cesar Chavez Jr in June. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
As the WhatsApps poured in on Sunday night — most of them along the lines of ‘wtf’ — the impulse was to argue back to friends that Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua isn’t a boxing problem, per se, but a people problem. That Netflix is willing to part with nine figures to stage this pointless contest means that there exists a market for it; and this market exists only because of our innate, morbid curiosity — the same one that causes us to slow down and survey the scene as we pass a car crash.
That’s only half the truth, though. Of course this is boxing’s bloody fault. Former two-time heavyweight belt-holder Anthony Joshua has a fine CV, to be clear, but that he will have fought Francis Ngannou and Jake Paul without competing against Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder is indicative of the rot that has beset the sport in the last two decades.
The walking billboard that is ‘AJ’ was once a big enough deal to have ripped up the red tape, and so he is equally complicit in his failure to deliver showdowns with two of his generational peers during their respective primes. To some degree, though, he may be pardoned for taking this tune-up against Paul when one considers his current career state.
Joshua, who just turned 36, hasn’t fought since Daniel Dubois violently inflicted upon him a fourth career defeat — and a second by stoppage — in September 2024. Currently on his desk sits a two-fight mega-deal with Riyadh Season for 2026, the latter bout of which is slated to be against Fury. As such, Matchroom had planned for Joshua to dust off the cobwebs against a relative nobody, the unranked Cassius Chaney (24-3, 17KOs), before year’s end.
To swap a relatively low-paid comeback fight against one journeyman on DAZN for a reported £50 million (€56m) comeback fight against an even worse fighter on Netflix is plainly good business if you can get it.
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Anthony Joshua. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Jake Paul, to be clear, is not a mixed-martial-arts convert like Ngannou, nor is it really pertinent at this point to describe him as a ‘YouTuber-turned-boxer.’ After six years of full-time training and 12 fights, Paul should be considered just as much of a professional boxer as the vast majority of the 28,000-odd athletes listed as active on BoxRec. And like most of those guys, he’s crap.
The notion that his 11 beaten opponents took dives doesn’t stand to scrutiny; indeed, it stands to reason that he would have beaten such shells of men — most of them already prised open and spat out by a different combat code — considering the training resources at his disposal and the fact that, in fairness, he seems to carry some power in his right hand.
But victories against such has-beens carry virtually no weight in boxing, and Paul has already suffered a cruiserweight defeat at the pillow fists of a never-gonna-be, Tommy Fury, who is likely the only one of his opponents still capable of running a half-marathon without a risk to his life.
Boxers past and present have stressed that those are the exact stakes facing Paul in his eight-round contest with a live heavyweight next month.
“If Jake Paul is left with Anthony Joshua unloading on him, it could be the end for him,” said David Haye on Sky Sports. “It could be his last day on Earth. It shouldn’t go ahead. There’s no reason for it to go ahead. It’s going to be brutal. I hope they’ve got good paramedics close by.”
Rising heavyweight star Moses Itauma, meanwhile, told the BBC: “I’m not saying he shouldn’t take the fight, I’m just saying he needs to weigh up the outcomes.
“I dunno — ‘50 mill, and then my health; cars and watches, can’t say my name.’”
Clearly, Paul’s only business in the ring with Joshua is business itself. The fact that the bout will take place in Miami, Florida, hints that America’s more traditional boxing haunts — the likes of Nevada, New York and California — didn’t particularly like the look of it.
Neither did Jake Paul’s older brother, Logan, by the way — at least when Jake first took Joshua’s name in vain back in March.
“When you called out Anthony Joshua, were you on cocaine?” Logan, now a WWE star, asked his boxer sibling in a conversation on his personal YouTube channel.
“No, I don’t do that thang… but I would if you got some!’ Jake quipped back.
“Why did you do that?” Logan asked Jake, to which the younger brother replied: “To be the heavyweight champion of the world. His chin’s gone.”
“But he’s still Anthony Joshua,” Logan retorted.
“Which is stiff and no rhythm,” said Jake. “No skill, just power.”
“You’re serious about fighting him?” Logan asked. “Bruh…”
Brothers Jake Paul (L) and Logan Paul. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
It’s difficult to gauge whether Logan’s concern was sincere or performative. The Paul brothers exist in a Truman Show of their own creation, their public lives carefully curated to colonise the attention of the doom-scroller.
A fight against Anthony Joshua will harness the power of social media algorithms, certainly, if only because Joshua’s physical power carries with it potential real-life consequences for a man who is deemed by many to personify cultural decay.
“While he was winning Olympic gold, I was filming Vines in high school,” Paul said of Joshua on his own YouTube channel on Tuesday. “AJ is a knockout artist with fights that have literally ended in seconds.
“I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little scared.”
And yet even that apparent admission of fear must be taken with a pinch of salt.
While it’s undeniably true that one punch can end a man’s life, the vast majority of boxing’s worst tragedies have been the result of sustained beatings across multiple rounds. Paul will not be allowed to take such punishment, nor will Joshua want to dish it out.
The Englishman is not some kind of cyborg assassin but a man with agency who happens to be fond of his opponent. Whereas AJ sufficiently respected the threat of former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou in March of last year to blast him halfway out of the ring, he’s surely more likely to play with his food this December before bringing things to a merciful end.
Jake Paul will get a soft landing on a bed of cash, Anthony Joshua will move onto more money-spinning fights in 2026, and it’ll be a zero-sum game for the rest of us.
It won’t quite belong to Netflix’s fiction category but it’ll be a far cry from true sport. YouTube highlights of Hungary 2-3 Ireland are bound to get a bump that night.
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Jake Paul's only business in the ring with Anthony Joshua is business itself
WE LAMENT NO longer football’s ‘international breaks’ but the vast Premier League windows between them.
Troy Parrott’s winner in Budapest engendered an explosion of joy so pure that its ripples touched lands far beyond Ireland. Consumed by millions through social media, it emphasised the degree to which international football — at least in the years between its curtsies to despots — now provides refuge from a top-level club equivalent that continues to drift away from its people into orbit, its tethers gnawed loose by greedy pigs long ago.
Parrott and Ireland elevated us on Sunday afternoon to a plane we rarely get to visit; one on which adults revert to giddy, flailing, innocent kids, and one on which their kids begin to believe that they can bring us all back there when they grow up.
It felt prescient to cling to such an antidotal, communal upswing. And the moment felt all the more precious a day later, when boxing’s Problem Child darkened our door with its very antithesis.
Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua. Ah, bollocks.
Depressing was the reality that the announcement of this heavyweight fight on 19 December didn’t even feel surreal. Scarcely believable is that 2017, the year in which Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor’s ruse paved the way for the ensuing slew of freak-show fights, actually feels like a more innocent time now: the humble boxing writer was given the leeway to ignore Mayweather-McGregor but fights of its ilk have become so commonplace in the intervening years that to turn a blind eye to them feels like a dereliction of responsibility.
As the WhatsApps poured in on Sunday night — most of them along the lines of ‘wtf’ — the impulse was to argue back to friends that Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua isn’t a boxing problem, per se, but a people problem. That Netflix is willing to part with nine figures to stage this pointless contest means that there exists a market for it; and this market exists only because of our innate, morbid curiosity — the same one that causes us to slow down and survey the scene as we pass a car crash.
That’s only half the truth, though. Of course this is boxing’s bloody fault. Former two-time heavyweight belt-holder Anthony Joshua has a fine CV, to be clear, but that he will have fought Francis Ngannou and Jake Paul without competing against Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder is indicative of the rot that has beset the sport in the last two decades.
The walking billboard that is ‘AJ’ was once a big enough deal to have ripped up the red tape, and so he is equally complicit in his failure to deliver showdowns with two of his generational peers during their respective primes. To some degree, though, he may be pardoned for taking this tune-up against Paul when one considers his current career state.
Joshua, who just turned 36, hasn’t fought since Daniel Dubois violently inflicted upon him a fourth career defeat — and a second by stoppage — in September 2024. Currently on his desk sits a two-fight mega-deal with Riyadh Season for 2026, the latter bout of which is slated to be against Fury. As such, Matchroom had planned for Joshua to dust off the cobwebs against a relative nobody, the unranked Cassius Chaney (24-3, 17KOs), before year’s end.
To swap a relatively low-paid comeback fight against one journeyman on DAZN for a reported £50 million (€56m) comeback fight against an even worse fighter on Netflix is plainly good business if you can get it.
Jake Paul, to be clear, is not a mixed-martial-arts convert like Ngannou, nor is it really pertinent at this point to describe him as a ‘YouTuber-turned-boxer.’ After six years of full-time training and 12 fights, Paul should be considered just as much of a professional boxer as the vast majority of the 28,000-odd athletes listed as active on BoxRec. And like most of those guys, he’s crap.
The notion that his 11 beaten opponents took dives doesn’t stand to scrutiny; indeed, it stands to reason that he would have beaten such shells of men — most of them already prised open and spat out by a different combat code — considering the training resources at his disposal and the fact that, in fairness, he seems to carry some power in his right hand.
But victories against such has-beens carry virtually no weight in boxing, and Paul has already suffered a cruiserweight defeat at the pillow fists of a never-gonna-be, Tommy Fury, who is likely the only one of his opponents still capable of running a half-marathon without a risk to his life.
Boxers past and present have stressed that those are the exact stakes facing Paul in his eight-round contest with a live heavyweight next month.
“If Jake Paul is left with Anthony Joshua unloading on him, it could be the end for him,” said David Haye on Sky Sports. “It could be his last day on Earth. It shouldn’t go ahead. There’s no reason for it to go ahead. It’s going to be brutal. I hope they’ve got good paramedics close by.”
Rising heavyweight star Moses Itauma, meanwhile, told the BBC: “I’m not saying he shouldn’t take the fight, I’m just saying he needs to weigh up the outcomes.
“I dunno — ‘50 mill, and then my health; cars and watches, can’t say my name.’”
Clearly, Paul’s only business in the ring with Joshua is business itself. The fact that the bout will take place in Miami, Florida, hints that America’s more traditional boxing haunts — the likes of Nevada, New York and California — didn’t particularly like the look of it.
Neither did Jake Paul’s older brother, Logan, by the way — at least when Jake first took Joshua’s name in vain back in March.
“When you called out Anthony Joshua, were you on cocaine?” Logan, now a WWE star, asked his boxer sibling in a conversation on his personal YouTube channel.
“No, I don’t do that thang… but I would if you got some!’ Jake quipped back.
“Why did you do that?” Logan asked Jake, to which the younger brother replied: “To be the heavyweight champion of the world. His chin’s gone.”
“But he’s still Anthony Joshua,” Logan retorted.
“Which is stiff and no rhythm,” said Jake. “No skill, just power.”
“You’re serious about fighting him?” Logan asked. “Bruh…”
It’s difficult to gauge whether Logan’s concern was sincere or performative. The Paul brothers exist in a Truman Show of their own creation, their public lives carefully curated to colonise the attention of the doom-scroller.
A fight against Anthony Joshua will harness the power of social media algorithms, certainly, if only because Joshua’s physical power carries with it potential real-life consequences for a man who is deemed by many to personify cultural decay.
“While he was winning Olympic gold, I was filming Vines in high school,” Paul said of Joshua on his own YouTube channel on Tuesday. “AJ is a knockout artist with fights that have literally ended in seconds.
“I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little scared.”
And yet even that apparent admission of fear must be taken with a pinch of salt.
While it’s undeniably true that one punch can end a man’s life, the vast majority of boxing’s worst tragedies have been the result of sustained beatings across multiple rounds. Paul will not be allowed to take such punishment, nor will Joshua want to dish it out.
The Englishman is not some kind of cyborg assassin but a man with agency who happens to be fond of his opponent. Whereas AJ sufficiently respected the threat of former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou in March of last year to blast him halfway out of the ring, he’s surely more likely to play with his food this December before bringing things to a merciful end.
Jake Paul will get a soft landing on a bed of cash, Anthony Joshua will move onto more money-spinning fights in 2026, and it’ll be a zero-sum game for the rest of us.
It won’t quite belong to Netflix’s fiction category but it’ll be a far cry from true sport. YouTube highlights of Hungary 2-3 Ireland are bound to get a bump that night.
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