Jake Paul (12-1, 7 KOs) vs. Anthony Joshua (28-4, 25 KOs)
When: Friday, December 19, 2025
Where: Kaseya Center, Miami, Florida
TV: PPV
Weight Class: Heavyweights: 8 Rounds
Betting Odds: Jake Paul (+775), Anthony Joshua (-1400)—Odds by Bovada
Fight Analysis:
Jake Paul takes on former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua in an 8-round heavyweight bout from Miami on Friday. This bout was put together after Paul’s fight with Gervonta Davis was cancelled due to legal issues involving Davis. Instead of a lightweight, Paul now sets his sights on a heavyweight as we continue down this bizarre path of the internet celebrity’s boxing career. Can Paul actually defeat an active former heavyweight champion? Or does reality begin to set in? Or is there something else afoot?
About the fight, there are some qualifiers. Most relevant would be a weight-clause that Joshua can’t weigh more than 245 on fight night. He was 252 in his last fight, and you definitely don’t want to see heavyweights who never had to make weight before now at a later age have to struggle to hit a number. Paul has mostly fought as a cruiserweight, getting to as high as 227 in the Tyson fight. Joshua will also be fighting at a distance that is foreign to him, with this being set for 8 rounds. Still at 6’6” and with his bodybuilder physique, Joshua will be the physically more impressive-looking athlete when they get in the ring.
How sure are we that there isn’t some sort of funny business afoot here? It’s a sanctioned fight and technically part of professional boxing. But with this whole Jake Paul thing, are we sure everything is on the up-and-up? Or are fighters who are more or less on their way out anyway looking to pick up a little extra scratch before going off into retirement? Without even saying something is necessarily rotten, I think it’s fair to have lower confidence than normal that a Jake Paul production is completely on the up and up.
And even if it is on the up-and-up, Joshua is on his last legs at 36. In March of ’24, he was still good enough to send Francis Ngannou sprawling to the mat. You’d think that fighter would splash Jake Paul. But it’s been a long fall for the former undefeated champion/Olympic gold medal winner. With every setback, things got worse. He became more vulnerable. Opponents were emboldened. And he became easier and easier to beat—a fighter with extreme offensive abilities who was now easier to reach and hurt, with his recovery abilities no longer the same. And he did hang in there well in the two losses to Oleksandr Usyk, but 24 rounds showed he is no longer among the best.
Now Joshua is 36, coming off a KO loss to Daniel Dubois that seemed to signal the end of Joshua as a serious factor in the current heavyweight scene. And that’s no disgrace to Joshua, a top heavyweight for years who had some huge success and made a lot of money. But after over a year off and there being only minor interest in any future Joshua endeavours, he lands in this spot.
With Paul, you have a bit of a mixed bag. Nowhere near as good as his popularity suggests, he’s still better than any streamer should ever be. In essence, he’s a cruiserweight fringe contender. In comparison to the heights Joshua has scaled, Paul’s boxing career won’t look very good when it’s all said and done. But he is probably a top 25 cruiserweight. In the big scheme of things, that might not be much. But it’s not nothing, either.
Still, not many people would fancy such a fighter over a former heavyweight champion who can still fight a little bit. But then we get back to the whole dynamic of this Jake Paul promotional machine, a sort of quasi version of boxing that exists within the larger context of pro boxing. This is uncharted water—a fighter scheduled to fight a lightweight champion, then turning his attention to a giant heavyweight. So right off the bat, we see we are not dealing with typical subject matter.
Still, a former heavyweight champion who smashed Ngannou last year should be able to crumple up Jake Paul fairly easily. Or so one would think. And why would a fighter of Joshua’s popularity and prestige make himself a jobber to the Jake Paul machine? Anything has a price, but hasn’t Joshua made a ton of money? And if something were going on under the table to make it so Joshua would throw this, that would be an exorbitant sum, and you can’t just move tens of millions around with no one knowing.
On one hand, there have been some suspect moments in the Paul story. A few things seemed that they may have been works. But the Tommy Fury fight, which he lost, wasn’t fixed for Paul. But at the same time, for this Jake Paul thing to be financially viable, he needs to win, or the mystique is gone, and why would anyone be ordering PPV to see what amounts to a fringe cruiserweight contender? If he gets splattered here, what’s the appeal to see future Paul events?
This fight forces a different set of lenses for evaluation. On one hand, why not figure the ex-champ Joshua is so far beyond Paul as a fighter and pick up some easy bread? But are you willing to risk that on a -1400 shot in a fight where you can almost smell the foulness before they fill the arena? I almost think the move is to take the large price on Paul. Then you can either bank on Joshua just being done as a fighter to the point where someone like Paul can trouble him, or what I think is the more likely outcome, which is that something goofy is afoot in Miami. I’ll take Paul.
My Prediction to Win the Fight:
I’m betting on Jake Paul at +775 odds. I feel the Bovada line has some upside in the event that either Joshua is truly finished or that something has been set up for this fight. It’s not a proposition that should warrant a substantial investment, but maybe just a taste on Paul at a big price just in case.
