AS WE’VE just witnessed with top-flight football, greed is a disease that has only one cure: the collective power of fans, players, managers and media when engaged in the struggle to maintain the sport’s integrity.

The speed with which in tatters was rendered the attempt to turn European football into an American-style spectacle and pageant, with the outrageously conceived idea of a European Super League, stands as a tribute to those who still care about the game’s soul. This is particularly the case when it comes to those within the game who were willing to speak out and do so without dancing round the issue.

Most prominent among those was Sky’s Gary Neville. 

Neville is one of the best, if not actual best, pundits covering football in the UK as these words are being written. If only top-flight boxing in Britain had its own Gary Neville, perhaps its movers and shakers would start being held to account as they need to be.

In truth, the difference in the standard of journalism when it comes to football and boxing in Britain is so great, you’d struggle to place them both in the same category. Football, as we’ve just seen, enjoys the benefits of a rigorous press and media, while boxing suffers from the lack.

This is why the likes of Eddie Hearn, if the rumours and US promoter Bob Arum are to be believed, can get away with locating the biggest heavyweight championship fight of the modern era between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury in Saudi Arabia without challenge from the posse of boxing journalists he carries in his pocket like loose change. 

That Saudi Arabia is less a country and more a family business whose primary activity is murder is clearly lost on top-flight boxing, much to the sport’s shame. It is further confirmation that top-flight boxing is currently drowning in greed – and greed, as Erich Fromm points out, “is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”

Do Joshua or Fury really need a purse of £100 million for one fight? Can Hearn and everyone involved in putting on this event really do so in good conscience? 

It would be a surprise if they could do so after surveying Amnesty International’s damning report on the human rights abuses that are endemic in the kingdom. Floggings, beheadings, torture, unfair trials, exploitation and abuse of migrant workers, plus a brutal crackdown on dissent – this is Saudi Arabia not yesterday but in the here and now. 

And this is without mentioning the state-sanctioned execution and dismemberment by bone cutter of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul three years ago or the ongoing war against the people of Yemen being waged by this corrupt kleptocracy at the cost of 223,000 dead and counting.

Tyrannical Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is engaged in a global PR campaign with the objective of placing lipstick on his murderous regime. Part of it is attracting major sporting events to this kingdom of barbarism, such as Joshua’s rematch with Andy Ruiz Jnr in 2019 ands the forthcoming clash for all the belts in the division between Joshua and Fury.

You would not hold your breath waiting for any of the current crop of boxing journalists and pundits to make these points, however. Every one of them is compromised by a dynamic whereby, in order to gain access to major fights and elite fighters, a de facto vow of omerta has been taken when it comes to raising such uncomfortable truths.

It is so bad and so corrupt that Neville would not last five minutes if he ever decided to enter the rarefied backslapping world of elite-level professional boxing as a pundit. Indeed, you’ve got more chance of finding a cactus at the North Pole than you have finding a boxing pundit or journalist willing to speak truth to the sport’s powerbrokers.

It is not only on this side of the pond that boxing is shredding its integrity and credibility. The new and growing YouTube boxing phenomenon marks an obscene departure from the nobility involved in a fighter paying his dues as he or she climbs up through the ranks, overcoming adversity in the process, on the way to achieving success.

If Jake Paul’s a boxer, I’m a banana. And if Floyd Mayweather dares enter a ring to face him as a boxer, as is being mooted, then both he and the sport will instantly walk through the door marked freak show. 

Since officially retiring from the ring in 2015, Mayweather has gone out of his way to destroy his legacy. His circus of a fight against Conor McGregor in 2017 was a spectacle of Roman greed from beginning to end. In the build-up, both sought to outdo one another when it came to flaunting their outrageous designer wardrobes, cars, houses and magazine lifestyles. No expletive or profanity was left unturned as they vied to live up to the truism that money, like alcohol, does not change a man’s character so much as enhance it.

The event, as with every major boxing event since, embraced the lie that extreme wealth and fame is coterminous with happiness and meaning, when in truth they are symptomatic of the moral sickness that passes for both.

In these dog days of late capitalism, boxing needs a doctor. Promoters like Hearn have been allowed to run riot with the sport’s reputation, cheating the fans who, as with football, are its very lifeblood. No site fee or any number of pay-per-view buys can abstract the fact that boxing has become detached from its working-class roots. 

Prize fighters are entitled to be paid well for the risks they take in the ring. However, a purse of £100m is an outrageous amount of money at any time, but particularly so in the midst of a pandemic in which countless fighters lower down the food chain have struggled to put meals on the table while gyms up and down the country have gone to the wall.

At this rate, boxing’s integrity will plummet so far, it will be hard to locate it with the Hubble Space Telescope.