THE scale of the Anthony Joshua vs Wladimir Klitschko heavyweight world title fight is staggering. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan confirmed that the capacity for the live event at Wembley Stadium has been expanded to 90,000 seats.
Eddie Hearn, the promoter, revealed the level of demand to Boxing News. “When we sold the last ticket online for the last batch we had 34,000 people in the online queuing system trying to get tickets. So if you’re working off an average of just under three [tickets per sale], that’s another sell out there with people trying to get tickets,” Hearn said. “Froch-Groves was obviously an eye-opener but we’re a lot more advanced than we were when we went on sale with Froch-Groves. Now we can monitor things to see the actual size of the demand. Things like online queuing systems and stuff like that just shows you the pure demand. It’s incredible. It’s not an exaggeration, we could have sold it out all over again.
“I think this could be a little bit of a one off, who’s to say Brook-Khan couldn’t achieve the same numbers as well.”
Ticket sales are an indicator of pay-per-view buys. “I think it will break all records on UK pay-per-view, which is held at around 1.15 million,” Hearn said. “Don’t forget if it’s at the O2 it’s 16,000 so you’ve got 74,000 more people in the arena, who would be buying it on pay-per-view. I just think the fascination of actually seeing 90,000 at a fight at the national stadium, I think that’s part of the fascination. Groves-Froch did mid 800,000s, so I think with Joshua’s profile and Klitschko, I really think this could break all the records.”
