Chael Sonnen intrigued by potential Tyson Fury vs. Francis Ngannou bout

Chael Sonnen wouldn’t be opposed to seeing Tyson Fury vs. Francis Ngannou.

Fury, who is recognized as the lineal boxing heavyweight champion, made some waves when he claimed he was speaking with Conor McGregor on potentially training for his MMA debut. Footage later surfaced of “The Gypsy King” training with UFC middleweight Darren Till. Fury and Ngannou have expressed interest in fighting one another. “The Predator” has said Mike Tyson has agreed to train him for a boxing match with Fury.

Former UFC title contender and current Bellator analyst, Sonnen, took to his YouTube channel to speak on a possible boxing match between Fury and Ngannou.

“He would fight Francis Ngannou,” Chael Sonnen said of Tyson Fury. “By the way, Francis would fight Tyson Fury. ‘Well, how you gonna get an MMA guy and a boxing guy together? How are you possibly gonna do it?’ Well, it turns out Dana’s doing something with boxing. Now could he get all those pieces together and is he interested and who’s under contract? Look we don’t need to sort all of that out, but just on the level of us having fun and then breaking down that fight possibly and start to discuss, ‘well what size of gloves would they wear and how many rounds are they gonna go?’ Because that’s going to be relevant.”

Chael Sonnen doesn’t believe that Fury vs. Ngannou would be the classic case of someone getting outclassed going into their opponent’s sport.

“Tyson moves real well, but Francis hits real hard,” Chael Sonnen continued. “That’s not just a slam dunk where you’re putting two top guys from two different sports together. When you’re doing it in the heavyweight division, particularly with guys of their size, there is more to the X’s and O’s of this. Particularly when you get the backstory that Tyson Fury’s always been a big MMA fan, but Francis Ngannou never planned to do MMA. His big goal was to go out and be a professional boxer. When you start to get armed with some of these pieces, you do start to see where that starts to be a little more interesting. Even if it’s a three, four, five-round fight, it could be three, four, five hard rounds for both guys.”

Do you think Chael Sonnen has a point about how Tyson Fury vs. Francis Ngannou could be competitive in a boxing ring?

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 11/11/2019.