Tyson Fury's promoter Frank Warren has had to defend the undercard for next Saturday's title fight against Dillian Whyte fight at Wembley. Fury's younger brother Tommy will feature the undercard bill as he comes up against Polish veteran Daniel Bocianski following December's cancelled fight with Jake Paul.
Also on the card is Anthony Cacace vs Jonathan Romero, Isaac Lowe vs Nick Ball, David Adeleye vs Chris Healey and Kurt Walker vs TBC. Warren has accepted the criticism of the undercard, stressing that the event sold out its 94,000 allocation based on the quality of the main event.
Warren and his co-promoter Bob Arum won the rights to stage the fight with a £41 million purse bid, topping Eddie Hearn and Matchroom's £32 million bid. There was controversy surrounding the bids, with the deadline pushed back multiple times due to Whyte's insistence on a higher share than the proposed 80:20 split.
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The criticism surrounding the undercard has led Warren to this week come out and defend the card, offering his explanation to disappointed fans: “Anthony Yarde was supposed to fight on there,” Warren told IFL TV.
“Unfortunately that didn’t work out. Bob Arum’s heavyweight, Jared [Anderson], was supposed to be on there, but he got injured.
“We’ve put all our money into the main event, but we’ve got a good fighting undercard. There’s a couple of good cracking fights on there. It is what it is.
“Obviously, it’s a disappointment. We want to deliver every time but at the end of the day we are constricted by the fact that we bid 41 million dollars for the fight. If we bid 32 million, as Matchroom did, we’d have more money to play with.”
Warren also made it clear that the quality of the main event was a big reason behind the lower quality of undercard. Whyte is the mandatory WBC challenger for Fury's world title and the night at Wembley will see the self-styled 'Gypsy King' return to fight on UK soil for the first time since 2018.
Warren continued: “We bid a lot of money for the main fight,” Warren said. “People bought tickets for that main fight without us even announcing an undercard. The main event’s what it’s all about.”
“We lost Anthony and we lost Anderson,” Warren continued. “We’re obviously very unhappy about it, but we did the best we could with the fighters that are available to fight at the moment.
“We put something together, and they are decent fights. They are good fights. There’s nothing wrong with them. We are not selling this fight based upon anything else other than this main fight. The rest of it is what it is. It’s an undercard. I don’t want to sell anybody short, but again, we only have a certain amount of money to play with.”
