Frank Warren has revealed the amount of tickets sold for Tyson Fury’s title defence against Derek Chisora in the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on December 3.
Many fans and pundits reacted negatively to the news that, following negotiations to face Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury is instead fighting Derek Chisora as a winter warm-up to prepare for an undisputed clash with Oleksandr Usyk.
Whilst that opinion is perhaps too quick to write off a motivated Chisora, it’s a hard one to argue with when you include the fact that Fury has already beaten his opponent twice.
With this view popular in the boxing world, some thought that the event would struggle to sell out a stadium – but, according to Warren, it’s well on its way to doing so. Speaking to SecondsOut, he said that the ticket sales were ticking over since selling 50,000 on the first day.
“Well at the moment we’re at just over 57 [thousand tickets sold.] I’m happy with that. We’ve got a while to go. I think if it had been maybe in the summer the fight would have gone probably straight away, but the bottom line of it is, it’s selling extremely well.”
“It tells you about the drawing power of Tyson Fury. He’s a massive attraction, he’s all over the place at the moment with the Netflix series, with the charity record he’s got coming out – everybody wants a piece of him and obviously the fans love him. How confident am I that it’s [the stadium] going to be full up? As confident as I was when we bid that huge money for the fight against Dillian Whyte.”
“I was reading something in one of the trade papers today saying it’s going to be a hard sell – how is it hard sell if you’ve already sold that amount of tickets?”
Joshua and Usyk’s fight in the same stadium, the first of two meetings for the pair, sold out within 24 hours. With a seated capacity of 62,850 and the pitch providing more space for spectators, filling every seat is no mean feat – and, with over a month to go, it looks like Fury and Chisora are on their way to doing so, albeit in a bit more leisurely way than ‘AJ.’