On Friday night, live on Netflix, one of the most absurd fights in recent boxing history will take place. Former heavyweight world champion Anthony Joshua will step into the ring at Miami’s Kayesa Center to face ex-YouTuber Jake Paul in an officially sanctioned professional bout. Ever since the fight was announced, boxing fans have been debating what could possibly have pushed the multifaceted American showman toward such a dangerous challenge for his own safety. Some expect a fixed fight, others believe Paul is motivated solely by money. I’ve come to a different conclusion, and in this piece I’ll try to explain it.
Those expecting a fix will be surprised
An extremely large number of people are convinced that Mike Tyson deliberately lost his fight with Jake Paul a year ago as part of a tacit agreement. If you’re among them, you may be surprised to learn that the vast majority of the world’s leading boxing experts think exactly the opposite, believing that it was Paul who fought with the handbrake on, sparing his elderly opponent.
This major misconception—one I addressed some time ago in an irony-laden article (click here to read it)—is now pushing the very same people who fell for it to expect a pre-arranged farce this Friday. In my opinion, this is the main reason why bookmakers’ odds are so narrow despite the obvious gap in ability: many are betting on a Jake Paul win not because they think he can pull it off, but because they believe Joshua will let him win.
That scenario strikes me as highly unrealistic for several reasons, the most important of which concerns the plans AJ has already mapped out for the final phase of his career. Even setting aside the potential legal consequences of a fix and the devastating reputational damage Joshua would suffer in the event of a loss, there are still the hugely lucrative fights proposed to him by Turki Alalshikh for 2026, including a long-awaited showdown with his eternal rival Tyson Fury. Failing to score a clear victory against a mediocre opponent like Jake Paul would drain the appeal from any future event.
Does Paul really believe it?
But if his opponent has no intention of going easy on him, why has Jake Paul decided to hurt himself? The purse the American is set to collect might seem like the obvious answer. While no official figures are yet available, estimates circulating in the media suggest a payday of around $90 million for each fighter—a haul for which almost anyone would be willing to do (almost) anything.
But Jake Paul is not “anyone.” His profile has reached such a level of popularity that it offers him a vast array of ways to make obscene amounts of money without risking waking up in a hospital with something broken and a few fewer neurons. Among the many staggering figures that testify to the incredible reach of the 28-year-old from Cleveland, here’s one particularly telling statistic: his main YouTube channel has surpassed 7.8 billion views.
So does Jake really believe it? Does he think he has a genuine chance of shocking the world? Usually, people who experience meteoric rises in fame and wealth tend to surround themselves with flatterers of every kind, eager to make them believe they could lift a mountain with a finger. Personally, however, I don’t think we’re dealing with a case of detachment from reality.
Paul knows he lost to a parody of a boxer (Tommy Fury), and he knows he struggled against an overweight former middleweight who had been finished for over a decade (Chávez Jr.). He’s not stupid, and he knows perfectly well that Joshua would beat him with one hand tied behind his back. Moreover, his body language during the first face-offs with AJ looked less like that of a confident man and more like that of Louis XVI being led to the guillotine.
The real reason is called “American Dream(z)”
American Dreamz is the title of a 2006 American comedy directed by Paul Weitz and starring, among others, Hugh Grant—a film I recommend you watch if you haven’t already. It’s a biting satire of contemporary American culture that, truth be told, can now easily be extended to the entire developed world and beyond.
I won’t summarize the entire plot here. I’ll just briefly recount one particularly telling episode near the end of the film: Martin Tweed, the unscrupulous host of a reality show, grabs the camera abandoned by a cameraman and stubbornly keeps filming while a man wearing an explosive belt threatens to blow himself up and everyone else flees the TV studio in terror—continuing to shoot until the explosion itself.
Jake Paul is a product of this historical era—an era that, alongside the enormous technological progress that has made countless aspects of daily life easier, has instilled in human beings a growing hunger for popularity. The pursuit of new likes, new followers, new views has become an integral part of our lives and, for some, has taken on the very characteristics of a drug.
Much of what Jake has built over the past few years—from his gargantuan bank account to the global notoriety of his brand and surname—has been the result of his ability to shock, to go beyond the limit, to leave people stunned and spark the curiosity of new followers day after day. And just as a drug requires ever higher doses to produce the same effects its user craves, so too does the social-media universe in which we are all immersed demand ever greater risks to keep us “trending” and prevent us from sinking into oblivion.
No, Jake Paul will not climb those steps after signing a non-belligerence pact with his opponent. He won’t do it thinking about how to spend the millions he’ll earn in return, nor will he do it convinced that he’s the reincarnation of Rocky Marciano about to unleash his “Suzie Q.” Paul will walk straight into Anthony Joshua’s thunderous right hand with the same spirit with which Martin Tweed advanced toward the bomb until he triggered its explosion himself: the spirit of someone who dreams of capturing the attention of every other human being on planet Earth and is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to pursue his American Dream(z).