Joshua Buatsi has celebrated his move away from Eddie Hearn’s promotional company, Matchroom, and broadcaster, DAZN, by claiming more people will be able to watch him fight.
The Olympic Bronze Medalist and undefeated light heavyweight announced the switch this week, and will be back in the ring following sporadic periods of inactivity on May 6 in Birmingham against an as yet unnamed opponent.
During the official announcement press conference, Buatsi said that he wanted to partner with Sky Sports because he didn’t want people to have to download an app and enter their email address to watch him fight.
He elaborated to Boxing Social, using his hard-fought twelve round points decision victory over Craig Richards as an example.
“That was a hard fight and I felt like a lot more people should’ve seen it than the amount of people that watched it. But lesson learnt, hence the move here. It was a hard fight man, when you’re in these fights you want people to watch it. You just want people to have access to watching it.
And if you look at the households in England, who’s got Sky who’s got all the other platforms I don’t know, but I pretty much reckon the majority of them would have Sky.”
Hearn moved away from Sky Sports when he announced DAZN as his promotional company’s exclusive broadcaster in 2021, taking a large majority of his fighters with him.
Buatsi is not the first high profile fighter to make the switch back by signing with BOXXER in light of the decision, with Lawrence Okolie doing the same recently.
When asked about that, Buatsi said that not all had been revealed.
“This is something that I didn’t really want to speak about, but I’ll be on my phone and seeing what’s going on on Twitter and stuff like that. The narrative that I turned down a mil to fight Bivol is what’s been put out there, but you need to ask yourself what were the caveats to that? What were the additional points?
Was it you fight Bivol for a mil and then that’s it? Of course not, that’s not what it is. You end up signing an extension for three to four fights – that’s looking at another two to three years at a channel you don’t wanna be on, or a place where you don’t feel you’re gonna get the exposure and recognition.
This guy will say anything he wants to say, couldn’t care less about it man.”
Outside of the brewing beef, fans will hope the Buatsi is active in this chapter of his career, and progresses steadily up in competition as he goes – something he’s not been known for so far.