Amir Khan and Kell Brook are once again in talks for a long-awaited — or overdue, however you want to put it — grudge match to settle a years-long media rivalry.
Nick Parkinson of ESPN.com reports that BOXXER, the promotion currently working with Sky Sports, is working on the deal for Feb. 19, 2022, in Manchester.
Khan (34-5, 21 KO) is about to turn 35 and hasn’t fought since the summer of 2019, while Brook (39-3, 27 KO) turned 35 this past May and hasn’t been in action since he was knocked out by Terence Crawford in Nov. 2020.
There’s no question that the fight is long past its peak as an event, but there’s also no question that it would still do numbers in the United Kingdom, and draw a fair bit of interest around the world, too, because a personal rivalry like Khan and Brook have fostered for years — without actually fighting — is always fairly easy to sell. It won’t do the numbers it might have in 2015-18, but it should still be plenty worthwhile for a promoter and broadcaster.
The last real attempt to put the fight together was probably from Matchroom and Eddie Hearn, who set the two up with tune-up bouts in the last third of 2018, hoping to match them in early 2019.
Instead, Khan took a fight with Terence Crawford, got stopped in a bizarre finish in April 2019, and quietly fought three months later in Saudi Arabia in an absurd mismatch against former featherweight titlist Billy Dib, which Khan won easily.
Brook had struggled to look sharp in his stay-busy win over Michael Zerafa in late 2018, and when the Khan plans fell through, he didn’t fight again until early 2020, easily beating Mark DeLuca, an American club fighter. Like Khan, Brook was drafted in to face Crawford because Top Rank couldn’t get a better opponent, and he, too, had an early night against “Bud.”