One of the main MMA and boxing pundits of the last twenty years has been Gareth A. Davies.
Him and Kevin Iole in the US have covered both sports for a long time, so Davies mentioning this on Talk Sport earlier is interesting as regards Turki Alalshikh and Dana White’s new UFC of boxing league and promotion due to start in 2025 and 2026:
“This is the biggest news of the week—maybe the biggest since Turki Alalshikh got involved. It’s a huge story. Dana White, head of TKO Group Holdings—which owns the UFC and WWE, worth $12 billion—and Turki Alalshikh seem to have pushed everyone else aside. Alalshikh has been bringing people together, and now he’s saying Dana White will lead the boxing revolution to find one champion in every weight division, bringing boxing back to what it can be. These are the two most powerful figures in combat sports. Until we hear more from broadcasters and promoters like Eddie Hearn, Frank Warren, Ben Shalom, and Bob Arum, it’s unclear if they’ll still be involved in the same capacity. We don’t know if this takes effect immediately or next year, but it’s a massive change. The UFC runs things differently—they often get the best fighting the best—but can that model fit boxing? How long will it take? What happens with the sanctioning bodies? My view is that since Alalshikh bought The Ring magazine—I’m on their rankings panel—he might use those rankings to create one champion per division. It’s a true revolution, and how it plays out will be fascinating.”
There’s a few things to look at.
Namely the promoters and boxing organizations stepping aside, that will take one huge pile of money to buy them all out — that said — if the price is right and so on.
The upside in such a situation is huge though for the buyer, boxing really isn’t even scraping the surface of its potential, even though it is flying at the moment.
Maybe boxing is only reaching about 10 per cent of its potential at the moment (at most).
Boxing has not yet tapped into the East properly and non-English speaking markets properly, as well as properly tapped into the tech space properly and fully — but it will.
There are so many upsides to growing a sport which is not that hard to grow either, for smart, passionate and relentless people who want to take the sport to the next level.
The other thing to note from the above to note there is the one champion per division like back in the day.
Literally one world champion per division.
Imagine that, wouldn’t that be something?
Boxing has a rich history which can be built on to grow it in the next level of development and fans, hardcore and those new to the sport, to see one world champion per division, would be a game changer.
If boxing can be unified, in terms of unifying it all, some how, some way, you are talking about something very special on our hands, no doubt about it.
