Manchester hosted a circus on Saturday. It was called boxing. It wasn’t. Trying to dissect the Misfits card is like trying to perform surgery on a pile of wet garbage. Where do you even start? Maybe with Tommy Fury dancing away from Eddie Hall’s massive, lumbering frame. Or perhaps with the self-proclaimed toughest guy in the country quitting after four rounds of glorified tummy-slapping. It was a mess. A glorious, addictive, profitable mess.
Nearly 20,000 people packed the arena. They loved every second. They left the venue throwing imaginary hooks, laughing, throwing money at the next ticket window. Misfits knows its marks. It is crude. It is shameless. Yet, you cannot look away.
Fury won. Obviously. He has actual boxing DNA, which was more than enough to outpoint Hall. The rest of the card? Pure comedy. None of these guys could win a local amateur tournament. Take “Big Stacks,” real name Charlie Roberts. He calls himself the “Hardest Man in Britain.” He has a sense of humor. He needed it. His fight with Armz Korleone was downgraded to body-shots-only because rapper Jordan McCann slapped Stacks at the press conference, leaving him with stitches. Stacks, claiming he’d been partying all night, basically quit in the fourth. A rematch is already booked. Of course it is.
Then there was McCann himself. He fought Jack Kay, better known as the “Ibiza Final Boss”—a guy famous for having a terrible haircut and dancing in European nightclubs. McCann talked a big game. Then he got punched. His brain short-circuited instantly. To his credit, the rapper survived the onslaught, learning the hard way that writing rhymes about violence is easier than taking a right hand to the jaw. The dancing guy with the bowl cut got the decision. The crowd went wild.
Anthony Taylor added his own brand of theater. He fell to his knees, screamed about some mystery chemical in his eyes, and then tried to rugby tackle half the security detail. Classic Taylor. It was chaotic, stupid, and exactly what the ticket-buyers paid to see.
When KSI helped launch Misfits in 2022, it felt almost innocent. Traditional boxing promoters thought they could learn some marketing tricks from these internet clowns. That was a delusion. Saturday night proved Misfits has crossed over entirely into the realm of pro-wrestling theater. It is terrible for the sport’s reputation. But as a business model? It is absolute genius.
