Joey’s Corner: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – Fury is back!

Tyson Fury has announced that he is coming out of retirement. In other news, scientists are closing in on a game-changing discovery that will prove beyond doubt that water is in fact wet.

Why the scepticism? Could it be that a return to the ring would break the fifth career retirement of ‘The Gypsy King’? Perhaps because he spent the entirety of 2025 agitating publicly for a boxing comeback? Maybe because his negotiations with Anthony Joshua’s team for an all-British heavyweight showdown have been a worse-kept secret than Han Solo’s death at the end of Star Wars: The Force Awakens? (Spoilers). Read on for everything you need to know about Fury’s ‘return’ in Joey’s Corner.

Inside Fury, there are two wolves. One is the only British fighter ever to hold the WBC, WBA, WBO, IBF and The Ring heavyweight titles. The man who ended Wladimir Klitschko’s decade atop the division. The ‘Gypsy King’ who rose like Lazarus, dominated, then went to war against Deontay Wilder in three thrilling bouts. A true heavyweight great and first ballot Hall of Famer.

The other is a contradictory cartoon who says one thing and does another. A man who once told me he did not care about unifying the four belts because the WBC championship he held was “the Daddy” before telling another interviewer during the very same round of media that holding the undisputed title was his lifelong goal. This is the Fury who retires at the drop of the hat, or at least until a microphone is placed in front of him.

For a while, Fury’s follies were laughed off by an appreciative public. But Britain’s most popular heavyweight since Frank Bruno has produced one pantomime too many. What the Mancunian big man probably imagined as a New Year’s treat for his adoring public has instead become boxing’s first meme of 2026.

The reason for this is because nobody truly believed Fury would end his career on the double-low of two losses to heavyweight bossman Oleksandr Usyk. Not with longtime rival Anthony Joshua at a similar loose end. AJ lost in a 2024 challenge for then-champion Daniel Dubois’ IBF heavyweight title. With the two Brits who put heavyweight boxing back on the map both needing a leg-up, a money-churning stadium fight with each other seemed like the way to go.

Fury actually announced his return on more than one occasion in 2025, something many retrospectives have neglected to mention while chasing ‘Fury returns!’ clicks. The 6’9” pugilist was asked multiple times about his plans and he called out Usyk for a (redundant) trilogy fight, saying he favoured that route over a bout with Joshua. 

Most took this as a negotiation tactic, which it likely was. But this is the same Fury who gave the world his mind-boggling trilogy with Derek Chisora, where he won every fight. It is conceivable that a man who produced 36 rounds with ‘Del Boy’, at least 24 of which were meaningless, would see the logic in fighting a man who beat him twice and expecting us to pay to watch it.

That is enough trying to understand the thought processes of the man. While he is a supremely gifted heavyweight and truly one of the greats of the 21st century, he is the most unreliable narrator of his own captivating story. Instead, let’s take a look at the boxing landscape that awaits the erstwhile heavyweight champion.

The Joshua fight is a home run, an open goal, a slam dunk and every other worn-out sporting cliche you want to trot out in a wheelbarrow of mid-tier metaphors. It has been covered extensively in these pages and beyond. Put simply, Fury and AJ are the two best British heavyweights since Lennox Lewis hung up the gloves. A fight between the two, even these faded, ex-titlist, mid-30s versions, would fill Wembley five times over. If this fight does not get made, it is the great failure of this era in British boxing.

But how do we get there? Reports suggest Saudi boxing impresario Turki Alalshikh would like the twosome to fight separate opponents under either his Riyadh Season or The Ring banners, before meeting each other later in the year. It is a dangerous plan, as neither fighter has looked their best recently and Fury is coming off a year of inactivity. Chuck in Turki’s preference for competitive bouts and suddenly the super-fight is facing more banana skins than Tesco’s fruit aisle in a tornado.

The biggest beneficiary of the semi-final approach could be Fabio Wardley. The WBO heavyweight champion has the missing ingredient that could make Fury vs AJ a true blockbuster. If one of the men walks in with a title, suddenly a fight that feels exciting if irrelevant in the wider scheme of things becomes unmissable.

But as Joseph Parker and Justis Huni found out last year, dispossessing Wardley of his newly-minted title will not be easy. Which of Fury or AJ is up to the challenge? One assumes it would be ‘The Gypsy King’ getting that chance, as he shares a promoter with Wardley in Frank Warren. However, will Turki, Frank and Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn want to risk the money-maker fight by dealing in Wardley, perhaps the hardest puncher in the division?

Such concerns probably put the kibosh on Fury fighting Dubois in their pre-payday scrap. ‘Dynamite’ hits as explosively as the nickname suggests, knocking AJ out a year ago. Fury’s been put on the canvas multiple times in his career, surely he won’t risk Dubois being the first man to keep him there. 

Who else is there for Fury’s grand return? Agit Kabayel fights on Saturday and is a fresh Queensberry signing. But his reputation as a spoiler, having upset Frank Sanchez and Arslanbek Makhmudov, makes him a dangerous pick. 

Dave Allen would sell tickets but provide little competition to ‘The Gypsy King’. Perhaps the build-up would be worth the price of admission, with the two verbose northerners sure to shine in the press conferences. Warren is looking to rehabilitate David Adeleye further at the weekend as he joins the Kabayel card. The Brit has looked good in fits and starts, has name value as an ex-British champion and would give Fury some rounds.

BOXXER would surely love to throw the current British champion Jeamie TKV into the mix. Fury has also surely at least considered forcing the public to endure Chisora IV. 

Dillian Whyte took himself out of contention for a Fury rematch when Moses Itauma levelled him in a round last year. The youngster is a brutally-effective KO puncher, not the sort of fighter you match Fury in for a warm-up.

Of course, the best solution is simply to do-away with the preliminaries. Joshua has just had a keep-busy scrap with Jake Paul. Fury himself has dealt with long lay-offs before and it is unlikely to effect him too much. I feel at this stage you take away the road blocks, give them each 50% of the purse and get them in a (hopefully British) ring as soon as possible. Fury-AJ is not what it once was, so strike before the iron cools entirely.

The above is all speculative but then all Fury reporting is. By the time this article is published, the 37-year-old is as likely to have retired as he is to have chosen an opponent. Such is the mercurial existence of ‘The Gypsy King’. The intrigue surrounding Fury is born largely out of the two wolves within him. Blessed to be Britain’s best heavyweight of a generation, doomed to be to Britain’s most confounding boxer of perhaps any generation.

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