Kathy Duva has revealed that negotiations for Bakhram Murtazaliev-Josh Kelly are being held up by the pursuit of a broadcaster to show their proposed fight for the IBF junior-middleweight title.

The promoter of Murtazaliev, the IBF champion, hopes that the Russian will return to the ring by the conclusion of 2025 having started to share her leading fighter’s frustration that there has been so little interest in challenging him since October’s stoppage of Tim Tszyu.

The combination of a hand injury and his observing of Ramadan contributed to the delay he experienced in fighting before Kelly became his favoured opponent, but before the IBF ordered him to defend his title against the Englishman they had installed Erickson Lubin as his mandatory challenger and watched Lubin agree to fight Vergil Ortiz Jnr on November 8 instead. 

Having fought Tszyu in the US and before then Jack Culcay in Germany to win the vacant title, Murtazaliev, 32, is expecting to fight Kelly in the UK. Kelly, perhaps unlike many of their divisional rivals, has been vocal about his desire to be his next opponent and, to that end, his trainer and manager Adam Booth is attempting to deliver for him home advantage for the night of his biggest fight.

“I’ve been in touch on almost a daily basis with Adam Booth,” Duva told BoxingScene. “We’re very much on the same page; we want the fight to happen, and we’re seeking a home for it.

“This is the new world we’re in, where there are very few places to go. You’ve got to get someone on board with you; we’ve been having very optimistic talks, but I learned a long time ago the best way to derail negotiations is by talking about it, so we’re just going to keep that among ourselves for now and hope for the best.

“I think the UK’s the place that makes the most logical sense. I’m not going to rule out the US, but at this point Adam and I are both eager to put the fight in the UK. We’ve got to find a television network first – that’s where our efforts are at the moment. I very much hope [it will happen this year].”

Duva and Murtazaliev’s manager Egis Klimas have been criticised for his inactivity and the fact that Tszyu, having been stopped by Murtazaliev in three rounds, has fought twice – including once for the WBC title in a rematch with the champion Sebastian Fundora – during the period in which Murtazaliev hasn’t fought once but she insisted that Fundora was among those who turned Murtazaliev down.

“We’ve been joking around the office that we’re going to give him the nickname ‘The most dangerous man in the world’, the way people are acting,” she said. “He injured his hand in the fight last year, and that recovery period was followed immediately by Ramadan. He’s fought during Ramadan – he did it when he had to when he fought Jack Culcay, but it was really hard on him. He asked me to promise that we wouldn’t ask him to fight during Ramadan again. Then you need time to train – he’s got to make weight. You’re looking at a period of inactivity that we expected up until June; we weren’t trying to do make anything happen before June. During that period of inactivity I was trying very hard to get something going with PBC [Premier Boxing Champions] for him to fight Fundora, and instead of fighting Bakhram he decided to fight the guy [Tszyu] Bakhram knocked out. That gives you an idea of what we’re up against.

“I had a lot of talks with PBC, and for one reason or another they just weren’t able to deliver. At that point in June I started to talk to Adam about perhaps putting together the Kelly fight, and in the midst of that the IBF informed us that his mandatory was due. The inactivity, from our point of view, has only been a few months. He’d have been fighting in October had Lubin not pulled out. We had an agreement with PBC for him to fight Lubin. That was going to be on the October card that Fundora’s on [against Keith Thurman, on the 25th], but then Lubin pulled out. 

“Now we’ve got Josh Kelly – that’s cool – we wanted to make that fight in the first place, and it’s just a matter of trying to get it done. It’s the nature of the business – it takes months to go from the idea of a fight to it actually happening. We’re working hard at it. But it is frustrating – during that period of inactivity Ortiz Jnr was offered a fight with Bakhram twice and he turned it down. The second time he accepted it, and the next day came to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to be able to handle a second-day weigh-in. This is the guy coming up from welterweight, fighting Bakhram who, to look at him, could easily be a super middleweight. The excuses are very transparent. Fundora won’t fight him; Ortiz Jnr won’t fight him. I come from a time in boxing when this kind of behaviour was unthinkable. Everything’s different now.

“Considering that we were negotiating prior to the mandatory coming up, I have no reason to doubt [Kelly’s] eagerness to fight, and unless something very unexpected happens I think he wants to fight. That’s all I can think. He wants the title. This is more of a traditional ‘I want to take advantage of an opportunity and get the world title’ mindset. You can’t win if you can’t take the chance. I have great respect for the fact he’s willing to take the chance. I’ve seen underdogs win fights too many times. We’re talking about him having a fairly home-field advantage. If you get the chance to fight for the title and you don’t take it, what does that make you? I don’t think that should change.

“We thought twice now that he had a fight with Ortiz Jnr. ‘Okay, we’ll fight Erickson Lubin’, and the rug gets pulled out from under you again. What can you do? This is life.”

Duva, the head of the decorated promotional organisation Main Events, was then asked about the difficulty of promoting a non-English speaking Russian in the US, and she responded: “I could have said the same thing with Sergey Kovalev – we did okay with him – I could say the same thing about [Gennady] Golovkin. The loss of HBO and Showtime in the US as a destination to put on fights is incalculable. It was hard selling the idea of Sergey – he had to accept fighting Nathan Cleverly for the title for $100,000. Sergey said ‘Fine, let’s go – I want the title, I don’t care about the money’. That attitude certainly helped. Nathan Cleverly wasn’t afraid to fight him. Once he won that fight that night [in 2013], HBO was kind of stuck with him. But we had the platform where we could go out and start promoting him; doing all of the things that we ended up doing to get him to be a star. I had the platform on NBC Sports Network, which was where we first were able to give him the fights he needed to climb the rankings. All that’s gone now. Without those platforms, promoting a foreign fighter in the United States is virtually impossible.

“If you look back on Main Events’ history, foreign fighters fighting in the United States is our sweet spot. We had Lennox Lewis and Arturo Gatti and we had David Tua and Ike Quartey. There were a whole bunch of them. They were all brought here, and they were all promoted, and they were foreigners who fought in this country and didn’t – with the exception of Gatti – have natural constituencies here from their countries. That HBO platform – in some cases Showtime as a platform – gave us a place to show them to the audience here and make them popular. We also worked with Dmitry Bivol. Look at the career he’s had. It’s got more to do with the lack of opportunity over anything else. It’s frustrating as hell. Bakhram, if you watch him, is one of the most exciting fighters in the world and he’s one of the most dangerous fighters in the world – and he has a world title. And yet, people are afraid to fight him. I’m very confused at the attitude. Here’s a guy with a world title, and a guy like Vergil Ortiz Jnr is choosing, instead of fighting him, fighting the guy who was clearly afraid to take the fight with him. There’s Fundora, fighting the guy who Bakhram beat to the point where he really shouldn’t have been back in the ring with a world champion so soon. It’s crazy – and I get some of the reasons for this. We have huge offers for him to go to Russia to fight but we can’t take them in this climate, and rightfully so. I don’t disagree with the reasons why. But we’re stuck where we’re stuck. We’ve got to make the most of it, and got to make it happen. We will. It just takes time.”

Fundora-Keith Thurman, Ortiz Jnr-Lubin and Jaron Ennis-Uisma Lima will take place before Murtazaliev and the 31-year-old Kelly – should a broadcaster be secured – finally meet in the ring. The junior-middleweight division – particularly in light of Gervonta “Tank” Davis prioritising a farcical exhibition with Jake Paul over his rivals at lightweight – has, therefore, come to be seen as the strongest and most competitive in the world.

Xander Zayas, Serhii Bohachuk, Israil Madrimov and Tszyu are among its other leading fighters, but Duva said: “If the guys would get in the ring with each other [it would be the best]. I don’t see a lot of interest in any of them in doing it. There’s fabulous fights out there – if they start fighting each other it’d be spectacular – we’d have another Leonard-Hearns-Duran-Hagler situation. It’s very comparable. I get the money – there’s this sense that ‘If I wait, Turki Alalshikh’s gonna give me $10m to fight somebody, so I’m not gonna take $1m or $500,000’. We promoted Leonard-Hearns. There was never a sense that ‘This fight’s not gonna happen; I’m gonna sit and wait for a bigger payday down the line’. It was ‘We’ll fight each other now and a pay day will come after that ‘cause I’ll win, or I’ll lose and look great doing it and they’re gonna wanna see me in there with somebody else’. 

“That’s pretty much how this is supposed to work, but it doesn’t work like that anymore, and it’s partly because people became accustomed to these massive pay days. They should get as much money as they can possible get, but it’s damaging when it brings your career to a standstill, and that’s what I’ve seen with all the other junior middleweights. Bakhram, to his credit, has never once said ‘I have to have this much or I won’t fight’. It’s ‘What’s available? What can you get?’. That’s always been his attitude. We’d have got very little money to fight Erickson Lubin compared to what he’s gotten in the past but it was ‘Okay, this is what’s available now – put on a great show and people will wanna see you again’.

“I just hope he gets to show [he’s the best junior middleweight in the world].”