Dubois Dangles WBO Title Shot at Fury — If He Beats Joshua First

Tyson Fury hasn't even walked to the ring against Anthony Joshua yet, and he's already being offered what comes next. Daniel Dubois, the WBO heavyweight champion at 23-3 with 22 knockouts, has publicly floated a title fight with Fury — on the condition that the Gypsy King gets past Joshua first on December 11 at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff.

Dubois, speaking to Sky Sports, said a clash with Fury would carry the same magnitude as his own 2024 win over Joshua, which he closed out with a fifth-round stoppage. It's a neat bit of promotional math: Dubois and Fury share a promoter in Frank Warren, and Warren, by Dubois' own telling, would love nothing more than another all-British heavyweight event under his banner.

The Catch Nobody's Saying Out Loud

Dubois isn't a free agent here. He has to come through his own next fight first — a rematch with Fabio Wardley this month at London's O2 Arena. Their first meeting in May was a Fight of the Year contender: Dubois hit the canvas twice before rallying to stop Wardley in the eleventh round. That's not the résumé of a man who gets to pick his next opponent without earning the right.

Wardley, now ranked #4 at heavyweight with a 20-1-1 record and 19 knockouts, is dangerous precisely because he already put Dubois down twice. If Dubois loses the rematch, the whole 'Fury next' conversation evaporates. So file the offer under 'ambitious,' not 'done deal.'

There's also the small matter of Fury-Joshua itself. After nearly a decade of will-they-won't-they, the two biggest names British heavyweight boxing has produced this generation finally collide. There's no rematch clause, which raises the stakes considerably — the loser doesn't get an automatic do-over, and the winner gets to choose whether to walk away on a career-defining night or chase one more belt.

What Fury Actually Wants

Here's the complication: Fury hasn't exactly been begging for a Dubois fight. The 38-year-old has previously dismissed both Dubois and Wardley as a level beneath him, and the only name that's genuinely moved him in recent talk is Oleksandr Usyk — the man who beat Fury twice and has also handled Dubois and Wardley. A trilogy with Usyk is the fight Fury romanticizes.

But belts change minds. Fury currently sits at #2 in the WBO rankings, and the sanctioning body hasn't named a mandatory challenger for Dubois yet. That's a lane Fury could slide into if he beats Joshua and decides a vacant-adjacent world title is worth more than chasing Usyk a third time.

It Could Get Even Bigger

And the WBO strap might not be the only hardware on the line. The WBA has reportedly cleared Fury and Joshua to contest its vacant 'super' heavyweight title in Cardiff — a move that leaves 'regular' champion Murat Gassiev, 34-2 with 27 knockouts, in an awkward holding pattern after he fully expected to be upgraded following his sixth-round stoppage of Peter Kadiru.

Stack it all up and the picture gets wild fast. If Fury wins in Cardiff with a WBA belt in hand, and Dubois gets past Wardley again, a Fury-Dubois fight wouldn't just be a title defense — it'd be a unification. Two British heavyweights, two belts, one more mega-event for Warren's stable.

For now, though, this is a lot of 'ifs' resting on two fights that haven't happened. Dubois has to beat the man who dropped him twice. Fury has to beat Joshua with no safety net. Only then does the carrot Dubois dangled become anything more than talk.

What's clear is that British heavyweight boxing, long written off as a spent force at the top end, suddenly has a loaded December and a tangled web of titles worth untangling. Fury-Joshua is the headline. But the real story might be who's waiting on the other side of it.