Tyson Fury announces return to boxing after fifth retirement

Tyson Fury has announced his return to boxing after declaring his retirement last year.

When he lost his rematch to Oleksandr Usyk, he'd declared he was retiring from the sport, telling people: "Thanks it's been a blast. Thanks to everyone who helped out along the way!"

He'd told people he was going to 'announce my retirement from boxing', but Fury took to Instagram recently to declare that his retirement was once more on hold.

He said: "Been away for a while but I'm back now, 37 years old and still punching. Nothing better to do than punch men in the face & get paid for it."

According to Fury, '2026 is that year Return of the mac', which seems to indicate that he's coming out of his retirement and planning on stepping back into the ring.

If he's getting back into the ring then he needs an opponent, with his last two fights coming in 2024 and each of them being defeats to Usyk.

Overall, he's had 34 wins, two losses and a draw, so the calibre of opponent Fury could expect to face ought to be pretty high.

The idea that he might end up stepping into the boxing ring with Anthony Joshua has been touted around several times but never come to fruition, so we might mark that one down as a 'maybe'.

His retirement following his second consecutive defeat to Usyk was not the first time he'd announced he was hanging up the gloves, with him claiming he was done with boxing prior to his 2022 fight against Dillian Whyte.

After winning that fight, he said he would retire as an undefeated champion, then shortly afterwards announced he'd be coming back to face Derek Chisora.

Given that he's retired before, there were plenty who reckoned Fury just needed a bit of time away from the ring before the retirement was off once again.

He's actually chalked up five retirements in his career, having said in 2013, 2016, 2017, 2022 and 2025 that he was going to be packing it in.

Sometimes he backtracked on the announcement within hours, whereas this one has taken him a year before he got back out there to declare he was returning to the world of boxing.

In a video he shared announcing his return to the ring, Fury showed he was exercising in all sorts of ways and put out his eagerness to get back to boxing.

I wonder who he's going to fight.