"For The Boxing Fans" Transcript & Analysis
News from Ring Magazine owner Turki Alalshikh
The wealthiest (and therefore, the most powerful and influential) boxing fan in the world took to Twitter to share an update on his plans in the sport. At the time of writing, it has accumulated just under 600 likes, under 200 retweets, and under 200 replies in the space of four hours. You can listen to the whole thing or read the transcript below, my analysis is further down.
Transcript
Hello everyone. I will wait to the people to be in the space. Is the voice clear?
I want to talk today about what what happened in boxing last two weeks and also what will happen from our side in the future. The last week we announced the first league of boxing with TKO and Dana White. We focus in this league in the talent and to give the opportunity for the fighters and to make something the fans like. We have a lot of ideas. I will keep it until the right time to Dana, because he's the CEO of the company and the league, to announce it.
This league is [a] project not against anyone. Not against the commission. Not against the promoters. This is my opinion and this is from my side. It is project [which] will have space in the market and we will still see the four belts and the commission and the promoters. The market is huge and no one can delete anyone from this market. For the Ring Magazine and the belt of the Ring Magazine, the Ring Magazine in this position is in the middle. The Ring Magazine will keep the legacy of 103 years. It will not be involved in any of these thing. This is something separate. The Ring Magazine will focus [on] doing what the Ring Magazine has [been] doing in the last more than 100 years. There is a lot and big upgrade for the magazine. There is a lot of people will enjoy the company of the magazine. There is big app and website will launch next January with big company. We will announce for The Ring Magazine collaborate with big merchandise companies in America and the world. They will sell a lot of things by the I.P. of The Ring Magazine: clothes, shoes, Panini cards, different things.
The Ring Magazine will start to have amazing and different cards. It will begin in London and Tottenham Stadium with the fight between Eubank and Benn. Then we will go to the Times Square for the first time. Then we will now study to do something in the 12th of July in New York and in March next year in Alcatraz jail. The Ring Magazine's now working for doing animation, TV series, comic book, manga and video games, and movie and TV series. There is a lot of surprise will come to the market from The Ring Magazine. There is a lot of great people who will be involved in the magazine in the future, in-shallah.
Now let's get back to the boxing. I see what's happened in the market in the last week and I understand the panic in the market because there is a lot of companies and there are a lot of promoters. What I want to say: we care about the fans and the fighters, and we will support the fans and the fighters, and we will continue doing the big fights for the people. There is a full schedule. I will say it in a couple of minutes but in the same time the relationship between Riyadh Season and the relationship between The Ring Magazine and the promoters will continue at least for the next one or two years. This depends about their reaction and about what is the options they will give us. If it is good for us, we will do it.
In this situation, I like what Matchroom and Eddie Hearn [are] doing. Eddie's still until now discussing with my team and with me to doing the big fights around the world. And he'll continue. Eddie [does] it and takes their position in smart things. And he decided to continue to work with us, if we are continuing doing business with him. And this is the professional way. And also we have a lot of discussion with Golden Boy to have some fighters from them in different cards.
The result of Times Square, it will affect the future of the Riyadh Season card. We want to see in October the rematch between Garcia and Haney. We want Teofimo [Lopez] to have a big chance, maybe against Boots [Ennis] or someone else in the same level. After the 3rd of May, we will announce the details about the Canelo and Crawford fight, the big fight in the history of boxing. We will not announce it before the 3rd, all the details. And there is surprise about who will be the promoter of this big fight. And the platform, you will see the big fights in it. We finish everything, but I respect the request from Canelo. He wants to focus in his big fight and dangerous fight in the 3rd of May. And after that, we will start to talk about the future.
We are studying and we will have Inoue [Naoya] from Japan in December in our country. There is a lot of options. I prefer him to fight Nakatana [Nakatani Junto] from Japan if it is possible. We will push to have something like this in the future. Now, maybe today or tomorrow maximum, we will announce the undercard of Canelo fights in the 3rd of May. There is a lot of surprise. We will announce it also for Tottenham and for Times Square for the fans. It's about the video games of 'Fatal Fury' and our relationship with SNK. The fans will have a chance to play, anyone [who] buys this game and registers with us, he will have a chance to play against KSI and Speed (two popular e-celebs) in the game. And to have the chance to be in the ringside in these two big events and have some gifts also. It will be something special. We finished all the details about Times Square. It will be surprise for the world.
My phone and my team is always happy to work with the promoters in boxing - if they give us good options. We are now waiting, and working in the same time, with WBC for the competition, the Grand Prix of WBC and Riyadh Season. It will be something huge. And it will be giving the opportunity for discovered new fighters and give them the chance. My focus from the beginning as Riyadh Season and as a person and as fans and owner of The Ring Magazine [is] to support the fighters and to make the fans happy. We will try to deliver big card with good price in pay-per-view. There is a lot of surprise. We will announce it soon. I hope you are enjoying what we are doing and like it. I hope getting boxing great again. Thank you so much. This is what I want to say. And wait and watch. Thank you.
Analysis
The boxing world has been ablaze with hoopla about the long-suspected and finally-announced TKO Boxing venture by Turki Alalshikh with UFC's Dana White and WWE's Nick Khan (TKO Group owns both the WWE and UFC). In June last year I looked at some of the earlier reports about this new league ("The Saudi Vision for Boxing") and wrote that "It could end up being another schism in an already massively fractured sport. [...] It's unlikely the WBA, WBC, IBF, and WBO are going to fold over and disappear into the ether. They'll have an entire ecosystem of boxers and boxing associations outside this new league to draw from." This appears to be the exact problem that the league structure ran head-first into and why they appear to be readjusting the mission goal to being a new promotional company.
People in boxing do not want the long-vaunted 'UFC model' or 'WWE model' because the existing boxing model pays more to boxers and promoters around the world, instead of concentrating wealth (and power) at the very top and with the very few as the proposed TKO model would. Perhaps the expectation was that the promoters and sanctioning bodies would roll over as readily as they did for the millions of dollars that have been thrown at them these past two years. Or maybe the hope was to catch them off guard? But the takeover announcement was so lacklustre that there was a little chance of any TKO Boxing rivals falling on their own swords out of shock or confusion. Anyone who has followed video games knows that announcements of "stay tuned for more details in future announcements!" can be safely ignored.
Mr. Alalshikh's purchase of the Ring Magazine was a savvy move from the perspective of providing legitimacy to the new TKO Boxing venture. Ring Magazine is officially older than the World Boxing Association (WBA) and World Boxing Council (WBC), but only because they choose to brush over their American roots in the National Boxing Association (NBA) and New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC). Boxing fans do like the history but Mr. Alalshikh's livestream statement seems to suggest that The Ring will not be involved as the official belt of TKO. Keep in mind though that the same distinctions were made about The Ring not being involved with Riyadh Season and the lines there have already blurred.
However, the credibility of Ring Magazine continues to attenuate on more serious fronts as it still peddles manufactured drama and ebin trolling for the sake of... well, it's not entirely clear why. Last week, Ring Magazine's own official social media told us about the breaking news that "The Editor-In-Chief of The Ring criticizes the new league, and Turki Alalshikh responds". Turki Alalshikh would follow up with a Dadaesque video on Twitter (227 likes at the time of writing). It later emerged in a YouTube interview that this was another cunning plan and boyish jape of Editor-In-Cheif [sic], Doug(lass) Fischer, the man who has run Ring Magazine into the ground.
Maybe I just have a warped understanding of what's funny or entertaining or worth paying for, but judging by the online engagement numbers I'm not the only one who is disinterested. The obvious concern is Mr. Alalshikh's willingness to support people who have shown themselves to be incapable in the past two decades. If Mauricio Sulaiman of the WBC was capable of discovering new boxing talent, he would have done so by now. If Eddie Hearn of Matchroom was capable of making a boxing superstar, he would have done so by now. British boxing cannot replace American boxing for the same reasons that British cinema has not replaced Hollywood. If Dana White's UFC was a runaway success which proved MMA would be the death of boxing, he would not be pivoting to boxing. For whatever reason, the flag of boxing will be flown by the captains of various sinking ships. If Doug Fischer was a good editor of Ring Magazine, it wouldn't have lost so many subscribers that the print edition had to be axed. The expression 'make [thing] great again' is practically an idiom for 'making [thing] worse in new and previously unimagined ways'. As evidenced by the roll-out of AI-generated scorecards and AI-generated punch stats in fights. Or the lack of quality control when it comes to the Ring Magazine's website and social media.
You can't even read the entire transcript of the owner's announcement on The Ring's website and their article doesn't backlink to the original tweet, it further reinforces that the people in charge of getting you to care (and click and pay) do not even care themselves. The earlier mentions of a "big upgrade for the magazine" and "big app and website will launch next January with big company" are possibly an acknowledgement that the December 2024 and January 2025 relaunch of The Ring have not gone as swimmingly as they may have envisioned.
A more positive and interesting innovation was the unmissable introduction of a shiny new sponsor, Japanese game studio SNK and their video game 'Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves'. While it's welcome that companies foreign to boxing are getting involved in some capacity, there's a flaw here. Let alone the juxtaposition created by naming a boxing event 'fatal', it's not particularly thrilling or sensical for a fight card to be named solely after an already existing product. And all it really does is deny promoters the chance to write the names of their events in the history books. Would 'The Rumble in The Jungle' have been as iconic if the fight was promoted as 'Paramount's 'Death Wish''? Or if 'The Thrilla in Manila' was forever known as 'The Return of the Pink Panther'? At least 'Knockout Chaos' and 'Four Crown Showdown' were trying.
I think these announcements would have more impact if they were better telegraphed. Sort of like a Nintendo Direct promising you details at a specified date & time in a snazzy package. Instead we get just a dripfeed of rumblings in the background that may or may not end up happening as more details may or may not emerge. Will there really be a fight at the Alcatraz Island museum (formerly jail) in San Francisco in 2026? Is a boxing anime actually in the works? Who's attached to these project? Is Netflix going to be involved? It's tough to rely on information from people who admit to being unreliable. The first real hurdle for seeing whether the ambition can come to fruition in reality will be the May 2nd Times Square triple-header, an event which is unusually scant on logistical details with only 7 weeks to go until fight night. If they pull that off, some trust would be built in their ability to deliver. And if it fails to meet expectations then that's just par for the course in boxing.
During the obligatory 40-minute podcast segments between fights on one of DAZN's Riyadh Season broadcasts last year, I believe it was company man Ade Oladipo who tried making the point that Saudi Arabia was bringing back hope to boxing fans. And while I'm still open-minded to the potential good that can come from Saudi Arabia's interest in the sport, it's not because an extinguished hopefulness has been renervated. If there's one thing that boxing fans have an ample supply of, it's a never-ending hope that the sport will fix some of its eminently fixable problems. Things are annoying about the sport but that's always been the case. It's in boxing's nature to be a terrible business and it's a boxing fan's nature to be disappointed and aggrieved, though never hopeless. Should you give up hope, then you've ceased to be a boxing fan.