It’s official! Jake Paul will fight Anthony Joshua in a professional boxing match set to air on Netflix on Friday December 19th.
The fight was announced by Paul himself on social media early on Monday morning
(Nov. 17, 2025).
“Yes, it’s real,” Paul wrote on X. “JAKE PAUL vs ANTHONY JOSHUA will go head to head in a pro heavyweight fight LIVE only on Netflix. Friday December 19.”
The accompanying poster has the Kaseya Center in Miami, Florida as the location for the fight, which is being explicitly advertised as a pro heavyweight bout and not an exhibition.
Reports of Paul vs. Joshua have been brewing all week, but there were a lot of people who believed Paul was just grandstanding and using Joshua’s name for clout before an inevitable collapse of negotiations would leave him fighting another old and busted opponent.
That’s not the case this time, it seems. For years Paul has been carefully picking opponents that he can look good against. We’ve watched him beat past-their-prime MMA fighters like Anderson Silva, Nate Diaz, and Tyron Woodley. He added boxing names like Mike Tyson and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. over the past year. And he was supposed to face Gervonta “Tank” Davis before legal issues caused that fight to collapse.
After his November 14th fight with Davis fell apart, Paul was left looking for another opponent that would generate massive viewership and justify Netflix’s big payments. With little time to negotiate and few options, he may have finally booked himself into a match where he’ll get annihilated. Anthony Joshua is one of the greatest heavyweight boxers on earth right now, and we learned watching him fight Francis Ngannou that he will not go easy on freakshow opponents.
“That’s a f–king bad idea,” UFC CEO Dana White said of the match-up following UFC 322. “That’s a bad idea. But let me tell you what, a lot of people would watch that one. You know what everybody is tuning in on that one for. I think everybody is finally gonna get what they’ve been waiting for.”
