Tyson Fury has admitted he did not train for the October 2023 fight with Francis Ngannou, telling the ALF Global podcast the crossover bout was not really a fight in his mind but an exhibition he called “play”. The framing flatly contradicts what he and his team said in and around fight week.

Fury pushed back against the idea that skipping camp was a slight to Ngannou. He said he knew Ngannou was a good fighter but insisted there are “levels to boxing”, and that the crossover bout did not belong in the same category as a title fight.

What actually happened in Riyadh

The bout, staged on 28 October 2023 at the Kingdom Arena in Saudi Arabia, was billed as “Battle of the Baddest” and put on the record as a professional heavyweight fight, though Fury’s WBC belt was not on the line. It ended in a split decision, scored 96-93 and 95-94 for Fury and 95-94 for Ngannou. Fury was dropped in the third round.

Ngannou, boxing for the first time as a professional, called the result a “shame for boxing” in a statement the following day. A large section of the working press had scored it his way. The cards stood.

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The story Fury told in 2023

The candour on ALF Global reverses Fury’s own post-fight line. In Riyadh he insisted he had trained for 12 weeks and given the camp everything he had. That version was already under pressure from inside his own team.

Sparring partner Martin Bakole told IFL TV that Fury was “not 100% focused in the gym” and that a signed Oleksandr Usyk contract had been on his mind through the Ngannou preparation, describing sessions of “four rounds, six rounds” of sparring that were nothing like earlier camps.

The commercial verdict sharpened the point. The US pay-per-view landed around 67,000 buys across cable and ESPN+, a fraction of the numbers Fury and Ngannou had drawn separately at their peaks, and was widely written off as a flop.

The Joshua fight and the timing of the admission

Fury returned from a 16-month retirement in April 2026 with a unanimous-decision win over Arslanbek Makhmudov at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, then stopped Mariusz Wach in Thailand on 24 July, forcing the Pole’s corner to pull him out after the seventh round at the Max Muay Thai Stadium in Pattaya.

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The Joshua fight is signed for the fourth quarter of 2026 on Netflix, with November the target date and a British stadium the preferred venue. Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn confirmed the deal in late April 2026.

“Signed, sealed and delivered! AJ vs Fury is on!” Hearn wrote.

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