Have you ever asked yourself how much you’d need to be paid to take a punch from a professional boxer?
Let’s raise the stakes. Make it a heavyweight. Men who stroll around at 210lbs and 6ft 2ins are considered on the smaller side. Now picture a 6ft 6ins Anthony Joshua - a Men’s Health cover in human form - weighing somewhere near 250lbs.
Joshua is a former unified world heavyweight champion whose power has switched off men every bit as big as he is.
His CV includes names like Dillian Whyte, Wladimir Klitschko, Joseph Parker, Andy Ruiz, Oleksandr Usyk and Daniel Dubois.
He is, by any sensible standard, one of the elite heavyweights of the past 15 years. And yet, despite the obvious gulf in pedigree, there is a small but noisy corner of the world that genuinely believes Jake Paul has a chance of beating him in the early hours of this coming Saturday morning!
What was once fantasy fodder for Paul’s content machine has, somehow, materialised into a sanctioned event. Joshua and Paul will meet over eight rounds, live on Netflix, propped up by three women’s world title fights added to lend the spectacle some borrowed credibility.
Those arguing that Joshua is diminished, and therefore vulnerable to Paul, either haven’t watched the 28-year-old influencer-boxer fight, or are simply shouting loud enough to claim a place within the biggest sporting circus of 2025
- Shaun Brown (Boxing News)
Paul’s record stands at 12 wins and one defeat in 13 outings.
The lone loss came to Tommy Fury in their 2023 “grudge match” in Riyadh - the same Fury whose first eight opponents included only two men with winning records, one of them having fought twice.
Since then, Paul has boxed six times and beaten six opponents: MMA icon Nate Diaz (making his professional boxing debut), fringe cruiserweight Andre August, the inactive Ryan Bourland, bare-knuckle stalwart Mike Perry, a 58-year-old Mike Tyson, and most recently 39-year-old Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., who looked disinterested until the final rounds required otherwise.
Paul did show improvement against Chavez Jr., but that Disney-channel bravado evaporated behind a tight defensive shell.
He seemed reluctant to genuinely press the action, while Chavez Sr. sat at ringside looking like a parent witnessing their child’s questionable life choices in real time.
In camp, Paul has sparred former cruiserweight champion and heavyweight contender Lawrence Okolie - and left with a black eye for his trouble. Curiously, not a second of sparring footage has been released.
Had Paul hurt Okolie, or even buzzed him, we would have seen it replayed in slow-motion across every corner of his social empire.
Yet we are expected to believe he can overcome a substantial deficit in size, pedigree and power.
Joshua - whose contracted limit is 245lbs - is effectively a different species of fighter. The idea of Paul engineering the greatest upset in boxing history is not analysis; it is wishcasting.
But perhaps, unintentionally, the seeds for something like this were planted 23 years ago.
In 2002, Jackass frontman turned Hollywood actor Johnny Knoxville stepped into a “Department Store Boxing” stunt with heavyweight novelty act Eric “Butterbean” Esch.
Knoxville weighed around 150lbs; Butterbean tipped the scales between 300 and 350lbs. Dressed in boxing gear and surrounded by bewildered shoppers, they traded shots until Butterbean clipped him with a right hook, leaving Knoxville unconscious on the floor. He walked away with a concussion, stitches, and six weeks of vertigo.
Strip away the branding, the press conferences and the Netflix gloss, and Joshua vs Joshua is simply a more professional-looking version of “Department Store Boxing.”
A novice stepping into grave danger against a former world heavyweight champion - except this time it’s dressed as a legitimate sporting contest.
Just like Knoxville vs Butterbean, once Joshua lands clean, the fight is effectively over.
What happens to Paul afterwards - and how badly he is hurt - will determine the scale of the fallout.
More importantly, it may also dictate how much lasting damage this spectacle does to boxing.
