Eddie Hearn has stepped up his war of words with Ben Shalom by claiming that Boxxer fighters are personally phoning him in a bid to jump ship.

The Matchroom boss and Shalom have been going back and forth for months now but things intensified over the weekend when Boxxer’s first show on the BBC clashed with Matchroom’s event in Birmingham.

Shalom claimed Hearn is ‘insecure’ in his position and labelled him a ‘50-year-old who works for his dad’, in reference to Barry Hearn, the 77-year-old founder of Matchroom. During an interview with The Ring, Shalom also said Hearn was not fit to 'lace his boots’.

Now Hearn, 46, has fired back at Shalom and suggested that Boxxer fighters continue to contact him personally about moving to Matchroom.

On Saturday night, Ben Whittaker boxed for the first time under the Matchroom banner after spending his first 10 professional fights with Boxxer and Hearn says more could follow.

“I’m never one to say that I’m not going to give him any oxygen by responding,” Hearn told The Ring on Wednesday. “I will always clap back and have my say.

“I get his strategy because I would do the exact same thing, I really would because nothing that ever comes out of his mouth is going to be exciting or entertaining unless it’s having a go at me. I don’t blame him.

“But in the meantime, fighters that work with him continue to phone me and say ‘is there any way I can join Matchroom?’ So he should just focus on pushing his own fighters.”

In contrast to Shalom, Hearn has never had a broadcast deal on terrestrial television but the Matchroom boss does think his opposite number is in danger of ‘haemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of pounds on every show’ of his new BBC deal.

“This isn’t a rights deal with real money,” said Hearn of Boxxer on the BBC. “But it’s still a good platform.

"The difficulty will be that you're going to be haemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of pounds on every show. So, it's how many investors you can keep coming to fund the company? That's the challenge.

“When you're just losing money week after week, show after show, that money will dry up. So, I don't believe they're going to do a show a month like they have claimed. The biggest problem they've got is virtually every fighter of note that they represent wants to leave.

“That means they have to get them out in big fights and they're expensive. It doesn't take a genius to know that the purses that those fighters are on versus the revenue that's generated on a BBC show, it just doesn't work.

“You've got to be a little bit cutthroat. Sometimes you have to let fighters go that are just too expensive for your capabilities or the money you have.

“If you're just in it for ego you're just going to keep losing money and then it's all going to be over quicker than you know it.”