Three years ago, Joey Essex tried to manifest his dream of continuing his family boxing heritage by writing his own homemade contract.<\/p>\n
The 36-year-old had already found fame through ITV’s The Only Way is Essex and had travelled the world for Channel 4’s Educating Joey Essex.<\/p>\n
But climbing into the ring was the new ambition, which he fulfilled in August 2025 when he fought Portuguese influencer Joao Barbosa.<\/p>\n
Essex returns to screens when he faces comedian Daniel O’Reilly, aka Dapper Laughs, on Saturday evening for his second fight.<\/p>\n
Essex, from Chigwell, dreamt of joining the Misfits sports promotion company when he wrote himself the contract one morning in 2023.<\/p>\n
“Did I write that I was going to be headlining a show? No, I didn’t write that. So I’ve actually gone past my dreams,” he told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“My family are quite huge in boxing, it kind of stems in my blood. So kind of makes sense for me, with my name, to be involved.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three years ago, Joey Essex tried to manifest his dream of continuing his family boxing heritage by writing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":797900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-797899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/797900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}