Ilia Topuria has strong opinions on what would happen if he were to face Terence Crawford in a boxing ring.<\/p>\n
Crawford is set to fight Canelo Alvarez<\/a> next weekend (Sat. Sept. 13) at Allegiant Stadium in what is being dubbed \u2018The Fight of the Century.\u2019 The fact that so many are giving \u201cBud\u201d a solid chance against the much larger Canelo tells you how impressive his boxing skills are. But according to Topuria, that wouldn\u2019t change how things would go if he ever faced Crawford.<\/p>\n \u201cI won\u2019t talk about what would happen between me and Crawford in an octagon,\u201d Topuria wrote on X (formerly Twitter). \u201cI\u2019ll talk about what would happen in a ring. I put him to sleep in the first contact!!\u201d<\/p>\n Photos of Topuria meeting Crawford at the UFC Performance Institute in June show their relative size to each other. Similar to Topuria, Crawford fought at 147 pounds before moving up to 154. Now he\u2019s facing Canelo at 168 pounds, meaning he\u2019s now bigger than \u201cEl Matador.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n It feels ridiculous on its face to hear Topuria declare he\u2019d beat one of the best boxers of this era when he\u2019s never even had a pro boxing match. His striking in MMA is impressive<\/a> and he has wild knockout power, but Crawford is 41-0 with 31 KOs and was the undisputed welterweight champ and unified light welterweight champ.<\/p>\n Even comparing apples to oranges, all of Topuria\u2019s impressive accomplishments in MMA barely begin to scratch what Crawford has achieved over his boxing career. Ilia does have a history of talking big and backing it up in the cage, though.<\/p>\n We\u2019re unsurprised that Topuria is taking this moment to call out Crawford. There\u2019s few UFC champs<\/a> that wouldn\u2019t jump at the opportunity to box, considering how much more money stars in that sport make. Crawford has claimed he\u2019s making $10 million to fight Canelo, but reports have various backend agreements pushing that number up as high as $50 million. The most popular UFC champions would be lucky to make between $5 and $10 million for a particularly big fight.<\/p>\n So why not call out Terence Crawford? Win or lose, Topuria stands to make multiples of what he\u2019d make if he stayed in his lane and kept defending his UFC lightweight belt. We don\u2019t see it happening, though. UFC\u2019s parent company TKO doesn\u2019t want their MMA fighters making boxing money. If anything, their eventual goal is to drive boxing money down to MMA levels.<\/a><\/p>\n But Saudi Arabia\u2019s involvement is a wildcard worth considering. TKO business partner Turki Alalshikh is known for getting what he wants, so if \u201cEl Matador\u201d can capture his attention, who knows what could happen in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ilia Topuria has strong opinions on what would happen if he were to face Terence Crawford in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,126861,79,12137,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-406462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-boxing-news-results","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-ufc-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115165719668404944","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406462","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=406462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}