More than 13m unlicensed viewers watched Andy Ruiz defeat Anthony Joshua

More than 13m people across the world – nearly 1m in the UK – used unauthorised channels to watch Anthony Joshua lose his heavyweight world titles to Andy Ruiz Jr, claims a piracy company.

According to data from MUSO, there were 921,994 unlicensed viewers in the UK.

Joshua’s parents hail from Nigeria, which had the biggest share of 2.35m.

The worldwide total is the highest since MUSO began tracking boxing in 2017, beating the 9.98m for the Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder fight in December.

The UK is third on the list of audiences by country behind Kenya (998,027), with 93% of the worldwide audience using YouTube.

“We saw how popular the Fury v Wilder fight was across piracy networks,” said Muso’s chief executive and co-founder, Andy Chatterley.

“The Joshua v Ruiz fight has been the largest unauthorised audience that we’ve ever tracked across boxing and it’s staggering to see that 93% of the audience watched via YouTube.

“The official pay-per-view audience figures have yet to be published, but this is a massive audience that’s being ignored.

“This highly engaged audience offers up huge insight and perhaps, more importantly, significant commercial opportunity.”

-Story by BBC Sport