Floyd Mayweather's opponent for his UK debut Liam Harrison has pulled out of their scheduled exhibition bout within just seven hours of the fight being announced.
The legendary 50-0 boxer was due to face popular eight-time Muay-Thai world champion Harrison, but the Brit has pulled out citing injury, as well as not having a signed contract, as the reason. Tickets are due to go on sale for the event, which takes place at The O2 arena in London on February 25, next week but a new opponent must be found now with just over a month's notice.
Mayweather announced the bout in the middle of the night on his Instagram page with a message declaring that he would be putting tickets on sale next week. But it remains to be seen if he will push forward with the event, which was initially supposed to see him take on YouTuber AnEsonGib, or move the date back.
Harrison said in a lengthy statement on Instagram: "Many of you will have seen the announcement this morning about my fight against Floyd Mayweather. Devastatingly, my knee just won’t allow it. Discussions about the fight started a few days ago with the Mayweather team and I honestly thought I would be ok in a boxing fight, even with needing surgery on my knee.
"I upped my training as soon as discussions started and had some hard sparring and pads but almost immediately my knee had ballooned up and I can’t walk. Hitting pads is fine but the movement and agility needed to spar and especially fight just isn’t possible. My surgeon is in agreement that this won’t be possible and I am absolutely heart broken.
"This fight and everything that would have come with it would have changed my life. Furthermore, no contract for this had been received or signed. I’m exclusively contracted to ONE and I had approached them for permission and sign off. Without receipt of the contract and ONE’s review and approval of this, nothing was confirmed.
"Floyd is the greatest boxer of all time and I would have wanted to put in a good account of myself. Not just for me but for the whole Muay-Thai community… I’m seriously flattered to have even be approached for this fight and I really think I could have done well in it. But, as things stand, I’m going to have to stick to my surgery next week. I really hope when I’m recovered we can make this fight happen."
Mayweather's team were initially looking to have the boxer fight YouTube star AnEsonGib, who is 1-1 as a professional and has won three exhibition and white collar fights. Gib is widely considered to be one of the top influencer boxers aside from KSI and Jake Paul, and would be a higher standard on paper than Deji, who the boxer fought last year in Dubai.
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"The way it came about was [Mayweather's management] said 'do you know any investors or people in the UK?'" Gib's manager Liam Chivers told Wade Plemons on The Breakdown. "This was a couple of weeks after the Deji fight and we said 'yeah, we can help to arrange that for you'. They went 'who would you suggest?' Because Floyd just wants a fight, he doesn't really mind as long as it's a 'competitive battle'.
"Of course, I mentioned Gib, in the UK if it's not KSI and it's not Deji it's Gib, right? There's no other option so we started pitching Gib and they sort of liked what they saw... We sent all the social media stats around, a video with Floyd in it because he obviously loves the attention, the [Austin] McBroom build-up, so they said 'let's go with Gib'.
"We agreed our deal with Gib ages ago and it was a case of 'can the investors do a deal with Floyd?' They went a little cold, this was just a couple of weeks ago. Bare in mind, Gib had taken some time over Christmas and he was just waiting and waiting to see if this would happen, 'do I need to get back in camp?' Because his head coach works for the UFC in Oman.
"They need quite a bit of time for him to take his whole camp time off for Gib, it's not a case of 'can you fly in today? We're fighting in three weeks' time'. That ain't going to happen. As it turned out about two weeks ago it was kind of a cut-off for us as well and 'it's not happening'.
"Then this week, Floyd was like 'TMT are just going to fund it ourselves, we're going to do it'. And that's great, but now you're giving us, we worked it out, Gib would not even have two weeks' training. Which is a shame."
