Boxing: Eddie Hearn Encourages Football Fan Culture, but Warning Signs Are There

Donned on the cover of the official programme for Josh Warrington's world featherweight title eliminator with Dennis Tubieron is a photoshopped image of the "Leeds Warrior" in a celebratory pose.

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Video: #LeedsWarrior @Josh_Warrington calls on 10,000 fight fans to raise the roof http://t.co/m8Q68nfKjr #WeAreLeeds pic.twitter.com/K6xcYVqzMq

— YorkshireEveningPost (@LeedsNews) April 9, 2015"

Down on his knees with his hands held aloft, it's a sight you'd expect to see from a striker on a football field rather than a boxer inside a ring. Similarly, Warrington's "freakish" fanbase, as promoter Eddie Hearn described it, has been likened to a loutish set of football fans.

Remarkably, Warrington sold just shy of 10,000 tickets for last Saturday's WBC bout—which he won via a unanimous decision—doubling the sales figure of his last outing in his hometown in October last year. Yet the rowdy crowd inside the First Direct Arena drew criticism on social media for their football-related chanting and aggressive antics.

An irate Hearn had this to say in the post-fight press conference:

"Someone tweeted me saying, 'All this is just football fans.' ...They say, 'They're not boxing fans—they're football fans.' Do they think football fans don't watch boxing as well? ... The crowd were great, we had a beach ball in the ring—I've never seen that before. That was a bit silly, but other than that, it wasn't bad. ... I don't see it as being hostile. Sure, there were a few beers flying around, but it's passionate. You see people with their shirts off—it means something to them."

Amid a whirlwind 18 months in which Warrington has become a British, Commonwealth and European champion, the 24-year-old former dental technician has made no secret of his support for Leeds United, and it's that affiliation with the football club that has turned him into a working-class hero to the city's people.

"Leeds like to get behind one of their own," claimed Warrington. "As I've said before, I'm just a council estate kid, and they see the hard work I've put in. Leeds United aren't doing too well, so everyone's jumped on the [boxing] buzz, and that's good.

Photo: Jamie Casey

"You get a lot of critics on social media. Maybe they don't like it for whatever reason, but how do you define what a boxing fan is? They go to football as well, does that mean they can't like boxing? ... You can be a football fan and boxing fan, too."

Never one to hide his motivation for making money, it's clear Warrington—although not yet at world level—is already one of Hearn's most valuable assets for Matchroom Sport:

"Josh is very, very lucky to have this kind of support. It's freakish, really. We've got Kell Brook, Carl Froch, Anthony Joshua, and Josh is potentially selling more than them for certain fights. At this stage of his career, he's selling five times as much as they would have been. ... He's a big Leeds United man, and the dream is to box at Elland Road. So we have to embrace it, not throw it away. ... Boxing's really good at the moment. We had 7,500 in attendance at Newcastle last week; 9,000 in Sheffield the week before for Kell Brook and nearly 10,000 in Leeds. "

With Leeds United having been scheduled to play fierce rivals Cardiff City on the same day as Warrington's fight with Tubieron, West Yorkshire police are rumoured to have influenced the decision to remove Welshman Nathan Cleverly—a Bluebirds fan—from the bill at Leeds Arena.

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Cleverly is no longer on the Leeds bill due to Cardiff City playing there the same day the police had worry's over crowd trouble

— Nathan Cleverly Fans (@NathanClevFans) February 15, 2015"

Although Caleb Spencer of The Cardiffian, a university newspaper, reported police have denied it, Hearn did suggest the implications were true when responding to disgruntled Cleverley fans on Twitter, which might indicate the force are wary of potential crowd trouble at Warrington's fights.

Hearn added, "It's important to me for the people in the arena to enjoy themselves, but it's also important for Sky Sports to transcend that atmosphere across to viewers at home because that's hundreds of thousands rather than 10,000.

"When you turn on the TV at home and you watch what's going on in that arena, you don't turn the channel over. You just sit there and say 'this is mental' and you want to go to it next time. But the good news is we have a kid here who can really fight."

All well and good. But what happens when, as mooted, Warrington meets Lee Selby of Barry—less than 10 miles from Cardiff—in front of 40,000 raucous fans for a world title fight in Elland Road next summer? Or, for that matter, any domestic rival with a similar football-related following in the future? I predict a riot.

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All quotes were obtained firsthand by the author of this article. Listen to the press conference in full below.