🥊 Tyson Fury Makes a Scary Amount of Money

Do you remember the night that Tyson Fury rose from the canvas in the 12th Round against Deontay Wilder?

At the time of sending this email, that was 1,990 days ago.

Since then, everything has changed for Tyson Fury.

He is a world-champion. He has become a PPV star. A best-selling author. And he has a hit show on Netflix.

He is also days away from fighting for the Undisputed Heavyweight championship in Saudi Arabia where he is reportedly going to earn £50m.

Today, we dissect the business of Tyson Fury and we start with that famous night in Vegas in 2018.

The Wilder era had 5 fights.

1. Wilder 1 (The fight!)

2. Schwarz

3. Pianeta

4. Wilder 2

5. Wilder 3

Wilder 2 was a PPV monster. PPV numbers are always difficult to know exactly but many reports suggests the fight did 800k buys in the UK and 1,000,000 in the US.

Wilder 3 did 1,000,000 between them.

That’s alot of money for these fights and those numbers are before we take into account the healthy gate receipts those fights would have generated in Las Vegas too.

Before his return to the ring from his mental health break, Tyson Fury rarely commanded such attention when he fought. As you can see, that began to change around this time.

As we get to 2022 we move into The Championship Era. This era had 2 fights:

1. Whyte

2. Chisora

At the time, Dillian Whyte was represented by Eddie Hearn whilst Tyson was (and always has been represented by Frank Warren). When two promotional companies struggle to make a fight happen, it often goes to “Purse Bids”. During a purse bid, promotional company A submits a bid to buy the rights to a fight, so does promotional company B. Highest bid wins.

Tyson Fury vs Dillian Whyte was the biggest purse bid in boxing history. Frank Warren’s winning bid of $40.1m for the fight was a truly outrageous amount of money. It was broken down like this:

• 10% to the winner - $4.01m (£3.1m)

• 70% to Fury - $29.5m (£22.0m)

• 20% to Whyte - $7.4m (£5.5m)

What’s more is that the fight was a homecoming fight for Fury, being held at Wembley Stadium. Tickets sold so fast that they had to apply for a higher capacity making Fury-Whyte the largest post-war boxing attendance in the history of the United Kingdom.

This was the peak of Tyson Fury’s popularity.

Despite the fight being a bit boring, it was a massive earner for Fury and propelled him to another stratosphere in the boxing ecosystem.

In 2024, he is now firmly in the middle of the Saudi Era.

The fight with Francis Ngannou didn’t have a stadium. It didn’t have great PPV’s. But they didnt need them. Because they had Turki AlShaik.

This Saudi era is tricky for firm numbers but my word its not tricky for earnings!

The Ngannou bout reportedly earned Fury £40m and that win set up the Undisputed Heavyweight fight with Oleksandr Usyk where a £50m payday is on the cards.

His fight purse trajectory in the last five years has been amazing and that lends firmly into his media endeavours.

Tyson Fury: Behind the Mask is his first book, it was released in November 2019. A report which was released in 2022 said Fury had sold 335,111 books in total for £3.3m via Nielsen BookScan.

The Furious Method was a follow up, released in October 2020. This too became a Sunday Times bestseller.

Interestingly, he doesn’t have an extensive sponsor roster like say, Anthony Joshua has. WowHydrate is the only consistent sponsor in his setup that have aligned with him for many years.

Who needs sponsors when you have a hit Netflix show however? I struggled to find specific numbers on how much Meet the Fury’s commanded from Netflix but reports suggest £10m over 2 seasons.

It’s an impressive haul for Fury, a self-proclaimed gypsy from the quiet town of Morecambe in the UK. If you’re a fan and you know of his struggles after the Klitschko fight, it might have been a stretch for you to see an empire like this being built.

The jewel in the crown however is his beverage.

In February 2022 Tyson Fury launched his won energy drink to rival those of Red Bull and Monster.

These are the moves I’m always fascinated by when it comes to elite athletes or elite influencers. In my opinion elite fighters are the best people to build this type of business

• They are self promoters and not restricted by a league or a club that they play for

• They are global by nature

• Highlights and images are transported around the world in seconds which live forever

• Frequent and regular opportunities to market your product for “cheap”

Conor McGregor set the blueprint with Proper 12. In 5 short years he too, also a popular fighter with a massive audience took took a whisky brand to a $600m exit. 

In this exact space, energy drink space we have KSI and Logan Paul with Prime who built their marketing machine off fighting each other!

So its a no brainer Fury launched this drink.

Weirdly though, he doesn’t promote it that much.

When it launched I thought we’d see it everywhere. Every fight. Every press conference. Every weigh-in. It’s been muted in exposure so far so maybe it’s a longer play(!) for the Fury camp.

But when all is said-and-done Tyson Fury will have made more than £150m from his “playing” career.

A successful exit from Furocity will see that double or maybe even triple! An AJ fight (or two) is the perfect platform to raise awareness for a brand.

Lets hope we get to see it come to light!

I’ve enjoyed putting this together.

See you next week.