👔 Anthony Joshua's Business Empire: Part 1

No other British fighter has made more money from boxing than Anthony Joshua.

Anthony Joshua’s fight this week with Daniel Dubois will be his fourth fight at Wembley Stadium and his seventh fight at a stadium in his career.

The scary thing being he’s only 33 and he’s only had 33 fights.

To put this into perspective, take a look at these legendary British boxers and see how may times they fought at a stadium:

• Prince Naseem Hamed: 0

• Lennox Lewis: 0

• Ricky Hatton: 1 (Juan Lazcano, Manchester City Stadium)

• Carl Froch: 1 (George Groves, Wembley)

• Joe Calzaghe: 2 (Peter Manfredo Jr. and Mikkel Kessler, Millennium Stadium)

AJ is streets ahead and I imagine he has more stadium fights in his career before he decides to hang up the gloves.

The man is a machine and outside of the ring, it gets even bigger. Brand deals. Sports teams. Real estate Investments. The whole lot.

The business of AJ is massive and today is the first part of a two-part series breaking down:

1. The Money AJ makes

2. How he chooses to Invest it

The man makes a lot of money so today we will start there and look at things from four perspectives:

1. PPV Buys

2. Gate Reciepts from Stadium fights

3. Fights in Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦

4. Sponsorships

A fight achieving 1,000,000 pay-per-view buys is a marquee achievement. It doesn’t happen very often and when it does it is usually only reserved for very big fights. 

Pay-Per-View fights in the UK are typically priced at circa £24.95 so getting to a million generates £25m off broadcast revenue alone. American PPV prices are notoriously higher (usually $89.95) so if the fight has a global nature to it and can muster 50,000 international buys you gather an extra £4.9m in revenue there also.

It won’t be of any surprise to learn that Anthony Joshua has achieved 1m PPV buys EIGHT times.

1. Martin

2. Klitschko

3. Takam

4. Parker

5. Povetkin

6. Ruiz 2

7. Usyk

8. Usyk 2

The man is a big draw and not only does he get people watching at home, he gets people to come outside too.

Usually a stadium fight requires a massive narrative and two big dance partners to drive a crowd. Like Froch Groves famously did a decade ago. 

AJ is different. There truly was a time where he could have announced a fight with me and it would have sold out a stadium. In 2017, he announced a fight with Carlos Takam at the Principality in Wales and sold that thing out in seconds. Even with the post-Usyk dip in popularity he still commands true drawing power. Eddie Hearn has applied for extra seats at Wembley this weekend bringing the total capacity for the Dubois fight to 100,000 people.

With the 100,000 in attendance and the probable 1m PPV buys, you can already start to gather the total takings from the fight this weekend. You can then apply that to the seven times this has happened previously in AJ fights.

His domestic run is obscene but these numbers all come before the Saudi era that we are currently in. On June 1st 2019 Andy Ruiz beat Anthony Joshua in a fight that changed everything. 

Whilst that was a short-term derailment in the US trajectory for AJ, the rematch began his Saudi era which has proven to be extremely lucrative.

With Skills Challenge initially and now with Turki Alalsheikh, AJ has now fought in Saudi 4 times:

1. Ruiz 2

2. Usyk 2

3. Wallin

4. Ngannou

Those site fees are game-changing and AJ has benefited from it more than anyone.

The man makes a packetload of money and the revenue in his company accounts proves just that.

AJ has a number of companies that he is a director of with one being Sparta Promotions. These sets of accounts are quite revealing and they show how much AJ reports as revenue for both his bouts and from sponsorships.

They also show a location breakdown of where he generates the money from:

I think you’ll be hard pushed to find another fighter that churns out this level of business on such a global level. I congregated all the numbers in his five most recent account filings to show the total takings:

There are two key things to note here:

1. These are just the last five account filings

2. The most recent filing says 2023 but it accounts for revenue generated from March 2022 to February 2023 (since February 2023 he has fought 4 times, including 2 Saudi fights)

£50.8m career earnings is nuts in itself but AJ has done that from sponsorships alone. He has deals with:

• Beats by Dre

• Lucozade

• British Airways

• Hugo Boss

• Google

He also has just signed a long-term extension with Under Armour too, the brand he has been a marquee athlete at for some time.

The value he has brought to British boxing since his career started has been incredible. Today we have discussed how much money he has made but think of the money Sky Sports have made, DAZN have made, Matchroom boxing has made alongside AJ’s career.

All this money has to go somewhere however so in next weeks’ newsletter we uncover how he chooses to invest his money.

That one is even more in-depth than this!

See you then.