The fight will be staged at NFL side Las Vegas Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium in Vegas, which holds 65,000 people.<\/p>\n
It will also be the first event that UFC president Dana White’s new boxing outfit<\/a> will promote, a partnership with Saudi’s Turki Alalshikh that almost collapsed before being revived in recent weeks.<\/p>\n Alalshikh himself was given a seat at the top table while White was not present.<\/p>\n The chairman of the General Entertainment Authority has been the hand of power<\/a> and driver of incredible Saudi investment in boxing in the last 18 months, but has not often been sat among the fighters at public events.<\/p>\n Alalshikh outlined his demands to two of the greatest fighters of their generation in the opening remarks, slamming “Tom and Jerry” fights and insisting they must deliver him “smashing face”.<\/p>\n The beginning of a three-city press tour that includes Las Vegas and New York, gathered media only asked Alalshikh questions before he left the stage. <\/p>\n It took almost 25 minutes before either fighter spoke.<\/p>\n Saudi Arabia has invested huge sums of money into sport<\/a> in an effort, the Kingdom say, to diversify their income revenues as a nation, but continue to face accusations of using sport as a vehicle for sportwashing and propaganda.<\/a><\/p>\n But with Alalshikh set to embark on a new venture of super-fights broadcast on Netflix and creating a new promotional entity to do so, the Saudi investment into boxing shows little sign of slowing down.<\/p>\n Back to the boxing and the news conference ended with the traditional face-off.<\/p>\n Dramatic music blared during it, with Alvarez being the first to look away in a emotionless staredown.<\/p>\n Crawford, who is being publicly backed by Alalshikh, said this is the fight he always wanted.<\/p>\n “I called Canelo out, he is the last great fighter amongst the era that surpassed us. The Floyd [Mayweather], the [Manny] Pacquiao, the [Oscar] De La Hoya. We both came up in that era and he got the chance to fight them.<\/p>\n “I wasn’t able to get those mega fights, this is my mega fight. This is my moment.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fight will be staged at NFL side Las Vegas Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium in Vegas, which holds 65,000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200892,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-201380","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114718920339321548","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}