While it is certainly not uncommon for a boxer to fight only once a year, alarm bells do start to ring when a boxer goes an entire year without showing their face.
That, unfortunately, is the fate of Anthony Joshua, whose 2025 has been blighted by elbow problems and whose attempt to return from a stoppage loss to Daniel Dubois last September has still to get off the ground.
Now, almost 12 months on from that setback, Joshua remains very much in recovery mode. He is recovering not only from the loss – the fourth of his professional career – but also the surgery he has recently had to have on a troublesome elbow.
Those things combined have left Joshua, 28-4 (25 KOs), in a state of flux in 2025. Moreover, they have led to some questioning whether the Londoner will ever be able to reach the heights of old and achieve his goal of becoming a three-time world heavyweight champion.
Some even suggest that by entertaining a fight with Jake Paul, the influencer-cum-novice cruiserweight, there has been a realisation on Joshua’s part that certain fights make more sense for him at this stage than others. Clearly, a quick blowout of Jake Paul is something he can engineer while incapacitated and something for which Joshua would receive large amounts of money. It is also considerably easier, as a thought, than getting back on the heavyweight ladder and potentially finding out – as he did last September against Dubois – the extent to which the contenders around him have caught up.
Then again, that’s not to say Joshua, now 35, lacks options and fights against men of a similar vintage. A fight against Tyson Fury, for example, remains an alluring prospect for fans, particularly those in the UK, and is a fight that should have happened many years ago. In fact, they are at the point now, Joshua and Fury, where time is fast running out and interest too will start to inevitably wane. If it wasn’t enough to have Joshua struck down by inactivity this year, Fury continues to stress that he is a retired fighter and has zero interest in setting foot inside a boxing ring again.
Neither of those things inspire much confidence in either man, nor do they help with selling what was once a can’t-miss, all-British heavyweight fight. Yet that doesn’t mean the people involved, and those who stand to make a lot of money from it, have completely given up on Fury vs. Joshua.
“Right now, all that’s in my mind in an ideal scenario is to fight Tyson Fury next year,” said Eddie Hearn, Joshua’s promoter, in an interview with Sky Sports. “That’s the big focus.
“From a common-sense perspective, the fight has to happen in 2026, but common sense and Fury’s decisions don’t always gel together. He’s got to want to come back. It’s a personal decision.”
In that same interview Hearn confirmed that Joshua would not be returning to the ring until 2026 and said that his next fight would have to be chosen “carefully”. It will not, for instance, involve Tyson Fury, or indeed anyone who could possibly capitalise on either Joshua’s dented self-belief or his persistent injury problems. Instead, one immediately imagines someone like Jake Paul, fresh from his little Netflix exhibition with Gervonta Davis in November, opposing Joshua in the first quarter of next year and playing the same role Francis Ngannou played for Joshua back in 2023. Or, if thinking heavyweight, and more seriously, maybe the rumours of Tony Yoka as a potential opponent will resurface once Joshua is ready to go again. “A defeat now, at this stage of his career, would be devastating,” Hearn conceded, hence why both the timing and the opponent must be just right.
