Tickets for the heavyweight fight between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium sold out within an hour of going on sale, with prices ranging from £88.50 to £13,128 including booking fees.
The all-British contest will headline a bill beginning on 11 December, although Fury and Joshua are not expected to enter the ring until the early hours of 12 December. Around 80,000 tickets were released at 12:00 BST on Friday, and within minutes more than 500,000 people were waiting in the online queue.
The fight, announced in September, will be broadcast globally on Netflix. It is being promoted as a collaboration between Saudi boxing powerbroker Turki Alalshikh’s The Ring and UFC chief Dana White.
Resale listings appeared quickly after the sell-out. Ringside VIP seats were advertised for £73,645, while upper-tier seats were listed at £425.
Ringwalks are expected to begin at about 01:00 GMT on Saturday, 12 December, after a short live music performance. The stadium is scheduled to stay open until 03:30. Organisers have yet to confirm any undercard fights.
Joshua, 36, and Fury, 38, are both former two-time world champions. They signed contracts for the bout earlier this year, but the date and venue had not been confirmed at that point. London’s Wembley Stadium and New York’s Madison Square Garden were initially the leading contenders, but both posed problems before Cardiff emerged as an alternative.
Principality Stadium has hosted late-night boxing before, including Joe Calzaghe’s fight with Mikkel Kessler in November 2007, which began at 01:00 GMT. Ricky Hatton’s victory over Kostya Tszyu at Manchester’s MEN Arena in 2005 started at about 02:00 local time so that US broadcaster Showtime could screen it on Saturday evening.
Only 11 days before tickets went on sale, there was uncertainty over whether the fight would take place because of a dispute over White’s role in the promotion. Netflix said Alalshikh’s The Ring and White would work together to promote the event, but Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn said his fighter’s contract prevented White from having a promotional role.
The British rivals finally met at a news conference on 30 September to begin the build-up to one of the most anticipated fights in British boxing history. Fury and Joshua are reported to be sharing a purse worth close to $200million (£151m).