Dana White Says Eddie Hearn Is Not the Guy, Barry Hearn Is
Dana White says Eddie Hearn is not the person who built Matchroom, and that Barry Hearn still is. The UFC CEO made the distinction while he and the Matchroom chairman remain locked in a public fight over who actually runs Anthony Joshua vs. Tyson Fury.
Joshua and Fury are booked for Dec. 11 at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, with the card streaming on Netflix. White has said his team will produce the show and that he will be in Wales. Hearn has said the contract keeps TKO out unless Joshua’s side allows it, and the two are due to sit down in Los Angeles.
White opened the conversation by framing the whole dispute as competition. “And I love to compete,” he said. “And if you say you want to compete with me, I look at competing as a fight.”
Asked whether he meant Hearn, White widened the target. “Talk about all of them,” he said. “Every one of them.”
He then went straight at the Matchroom chairman. “Eddie Hearn is weak,” White said. “Eddie Hearn, his dad built that business.”
White said the picture has become clearer the longer he has worked around British boxing. “His dad’s a real guy,” he said. “Like his dad, as I get deeper into this thing, his dad is the guy.”
He put Frank Warren in the same category. Warren’s Queensberry Promotions is on the Joshua-Fury promotion alongside Matchroom, Gold Star, and Sela, and White treated the Queensberry chief as a different kind of operator from Hearn.
“Frank Warren just came out recently,” White said. “He hasn’t talked any sh*t. He hasn’t said anything.” White added that Warren “has been completely silent through this thing,” then said a recent interview changed how he read the silence. “Frank Warren’s the real guy.”
He returned to the same line on Hearn. “Eddie’s not the guy,” White said. “Eddie’s dad is the guy.”
White tried to separate the criticism from a personal attack. “And I’m not saying this to sh*t on Eddie,” he said. “I’m just being honest.” He followed that with the line that framed the whole exchange. “And I don’t dislike Eddie. I don’t dislike him, but he’s not the guy. His dad’s the guy.”
What White said he liked in Warren was the refusal to keep the argument going. He described watching the interview and thinking, “fing love it,” because the message cut through the noise. “All this fing talking and all this fing bullsht, let’s f*ing fight,” White said, summarizing the tone he heard. “Yeah, that’s the guy.”
He doubled down a moment later. “Frank Warren’s like a f***ing real guy.”
The interviewer pushed back on the work-rate claim and recalled seeing Hearn stand with media for six or seven hours in New York. “Eddie Hearn’s work rate is impressive,” the interviewer said, describing a rooftop session “in the heat of New York” where Hearn “just did every” outlet in front of him.
White did not treat that availability as a virtue. He described Hearn as “responding to every little f***ing thing that’s going on,” then made his sharpest claim about the heavyweight fight. “The truth is, nobody’s done more to try to hurt the AJ Fury fight than Eddie Hearn.”
He closed that thought with a jab at the business structure. “I hope AJ owns a piece of Matchroom,” White said. He then named Barry Hearn directly. “Barry Hearn’s a real f***ing guy. He’s the guy.”
White grouped Barry Hearn and Warren together as “old school, f**ing hard dudes” and said their interviews tell him who is actually steering the sport. “I see through all the bullsht and I know who’s who and what’s what,” he said.
The comments land after months of the same argument. Hearn has answered earlier “works for his dad” lines by saying White answers to Turki Alalshikh, and he has called White “completely cooked” over the Cardiff production claims. White’s latest version does not accuse Hearn of a specific contract breach. It questions whether Hearn is the decision-maker at all.
That distinction matters ahead of the Los Angeles meeting, because Hearn has said White cannot be on the promotion unless Joshua’s side agrees. If White believes Barry Hearn and Warren are the adults in the room, he is arguing that the public back-and-forth with Eddie Hearn is noise around a fight other people are actually closing.
The bout is still set for Dec. 11 in Cardiff. Whether White leaves Los Angeles with a production role, a credit, or another round of this argument will be clearer once that meeting is done.
