Promoter Frank Warren believes the upcoming heavyweight bonanza between Tyson Fury and Francis Ngannou will only strengthen the ties between big time boxing and Saudi Arabia.

Fury, the WBC heavyweight titlist, and Ngannou, the former UFC champion, are set to meet in the ring in a “crossover” contest using professional boxing rules Oct. 28 in Saudi Arabia. The fight marks Ngannou’s long awaited debut in boxing, and figures to generate considerable mainstream attention.

But if the fight strikes some as a novelty one-off, one person with a vested interest in the event thinks it will have considerable ripple effects on the future of the sport.

Warren, the head of Queensberry Promotions, which promotes Fury, is confident that Fury-Ngannou will give his company considerable leverage to place more major fights in Saudi Arabia—a region, of course, not unknown for staging big sporting events, including boxing. Saudi Arabia hosted the rematch between Anthony Joshua and Andy Ruiz in 2019 in the city of Diriyah.

“This is a game changer,” Warren told SecondsOut. “It’s a massive event. It’s a game changer as to what happens in the future with these big fights in Saudi.”
 
“It makes a lot of money,” Warren continued. “Both of the guys will generate huge income from this because it has that appeal. But for me it’s another avenue to make these fights happen. Look, fights for me, in an ideal world, we put them at Wembley [Stadium in London]. But we’ve now got Saudi and interest from Saudi from various people there that want to put on the biggest events in boxing there.”

Fury, of course, was in talks for months earlier this year with unified WBO, WBA, IBF heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk to fight in the Middle East, but the two parties repeatedly failed to strike a deal. A pivot to London’s Wembley Stadium, where the fighters' purses would have been lower than the guarantees from Saudi Arabia, naturally did not improve their stalemate.

Recently, Usyk signed with Skill Challenge Promotion, an entity in Saudi Arabia that made noise on the boxing scene recently for its efforts to stage a heavyweight tournament at the end of the year featuring Fury and Usyk in one fight and Joshua and Deontay Wilder in another.

“Well it hasn’t worked this year, despite our efforts to make it at Wembley, it’s not happened,” Warren said. “And despite what they thought was going to happen by signing with a group over there, it still hasn’t happened. Now, we’re in a position because of what we’ve done with His Excellency, I believe that, provided Tyson comes through, which I think he will do, we will then be in a position to force these things to happen, to force them to happen. That's what the game is for us. That’s the way forward, how I see it.

“Because up to now everything has been unsuccessful. It comes down to one thing: expectation level. Expectation. Tyson was willing to make these fights at Wembley. He’s not been sitting around waiting for the big promise of the money elsewhere to do it, he was saying, 'let’s do it now.' He was right again, like he was right about Joshua not taking the fight, he was right that it wasn’t going to happen this year.”