A British marketing executive with no boxing license and a questionable track record talked his way into a mayoral press conference and nearly staged the world's largest outdoor fight card — until it all fell apart a month before showtime.

The collapse of the July 11 iVisit Boxing event at Civic Center Plaza isn't just an embarrassment for Mayor Daniel Lurie, who stood alongside promoter Ed Pereira at a January press conference touting a world-record crowd of 135,000 fans. It's a case study in how San Francisco's political class, hungry for flashy civic wins, handed a high-profile platform to an unproven outsider without asking basic questions — and left real people holding the bag when it unraveled.

At a City Hall press conference on January 16, Mayor Daniel Lurie stood next to a British entrepreneur named Ed Pereira and promised San Francisco something historic: a weeklong series of boxing events culminating in a Civic Center Plaza fight card that would smash the 1941 attendance record set by a Milwaukee bout drawing 135,132 fans.

Neither man mentioned that Pereira had no boxing license. Nobody in the room asked about his financial history. The California State Athletic Commission, which would ultimately approve the fight, wasn't at the table yet. The city's special events director, who had met with Pereira months earlier in 2025, has since retired and declined to comment, according to reporting by the SF Standard.

Five months later, the event is dead. Pereira's company, iVisit Boxing, pulled its city permits Monday and posted a cancellation notice on Instagram citing "growing logistical concerns." The California State Athletic Commission was notified Thursday. The refund demand came from Lurie's own office — a belated acknowledgment that something had gone badly wrong.

The red flags nobody followed

Combat sports journalist Zach Arnold, writing for the Substack newsletter "The MMA Draw," began investigating Pereira shortly after the January announcement, interviewing sources in San Francisco, New York, and London. What he found, he said, should have been obvious to anyone who made even a cursory inquiry.

"A five-minute phone call could have immediately sorted everyone out on what was happening," Arnold told the SF Standard. "No one ever did any due diligence. No one."

Pereira's primary credential was a May 2025 boxing event in New York's Times Square — a spectacle that drew pushback from the NYPD over traffic disruptions, orange fencing that blocked sightlines for fans, and complaints that ringside access was essentially unavailable. Boxing insiders say that alone should have raised questions.

Chris Cugliari, who coaches at Third Street Boxing in the Dogpatch and serves as secretary general of the Pan-American Boxing Confederation, said he'd never heard of Pereira before the SF announcement. "As somebody who's been in the world of boxing for a very long time, I found it highly confusing," Cugliari told the SF Standard.

The anatomy of a City Hall greenlight

What Pereira lacked in experience, he compensated for with connections. He enlisted the organization behind Bay to Breakers to help navigate city approval, and teamed up with veteran licensed promoters to satisfy the California State Athletic Commission. He also secured the backing of what Arnold describes as "the top lobby, the top contractor in the city."

"This couldn't have happened in New York or Las Vegas," Arnold told the SF Standard. "It happened in San Francisco because of who he brought into it. The top lobby, the top contractor in the city, and the mayor all went in on this guy without asking a single question."

By May, the cracks were showing publicly. At an SFMTA hearing on event logistics, organizers including Kyle Meyers — CEO of Silverback, the event firm — quietly downgraded their crowd projection from 135,000 to somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000. Bob Newman, editor in chief of Fight News, noted the lineup itself was never going to pull those numbers anyway. Without a marquee headliner — early speculation had centered on heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk and Deontay Wilder, though no fighters were ever confirmed — the record-breaking premise was always shaky. "I don't know if it's a show that even hardcore fans would travel for without this aspect of trying to break a world record," Newman told the SF Standard.

Pereira himself, in a May interview with the SF Standard, offered a refreshingly candid summary of his motives: "I'm an entrepreneur. I'm here because I still think I can make money on it. I want to do good by the community. I want to do good by the boxers. I want to do good by the city. But ultimately, I want to make money."

Who got hurt

Pereira did not respond to the SF Standard's questions about the cancellation. Lurie's office did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

The fallout isn't abstract. Arnold says ticket holders and family members of the fighters bought nonrefundable airline tickets, and some fighters remain unpaid. Most tickets were given away, but refunds for purchased seating are now being processed.

Cugliari is worried about a longer-term cost: the city's grassroots boxing community. Small gyms that had hoped the event would shine a spotlight on local fighters and generate new interest in the sport are now watching a high-profile embarrassment that could make future promoters — legitimate ones — think twice before betting on San Francisco.

"There are people who got hurt on this," Arnold said. "This was something that never should have happened in the first place."

The mayor's office has offered no explanation of what vetting, if any, was done before Lurie appeared onstage with Pereira in January. That question — who signed off, and on what basis — remains unanswered.