The Saudi Vision for Boxing

I spoke about Saudi Arabia to a lesser extent in my piece about The Big Fight. For the record, I'm not paid to shill for them and I'm not opposed to their investment in the sport. I'm a boxing fan (with an interest in historiography). Boxing has been a mess for a long time. I made a comment elsewhere that mobsters and odious figures had run the sport into the ground, and that if it was possible to separate the art for the artist before, then they're the best thing to happen to boxing in decades. After all this time wishing the sport would be better, there was no chance of quitting when a force for positive change took an active interest in something I care about.

The Big Plan has been anticipated for a while and evidently it's been bubbling under the surface. Last month, ESPN gave us a teaser. Yesterday, Reuters revealed that a grand unveiling would happen sooner than we thought. Today, the New York Times revealed additional information about the particulars. Let's run through some of these details.

We only have preliminary second-hand/third-hand information at hand so take it all with a grain of salt, in any case it would warrant further analysis if and when it's made official. This is just me thinking some thoughts out loud.

A league of their own

"Under the Saudi proposal, about 200 of the top men’s boxers in the world would be signed and then divided into 12 weight classes in what would amount to a global boxing league."

Each class would include about 15 fighters each, allowing the best talents to regularly face off. The move would effectively create a single boxing entity that would replace the sometimes chaotic and frustrating system of dueling promoters and warring sanctioning bodies."

"The new series would operate under one brand name, an arrangement similar to the business model of the hugely popular Ultimate Fighting Championship, which has steadily eroded boxing’s global popularity. In the Saudi-backed event, boxers would be able to move up the rankings tables but also be eliminated from the series and replaced by new talent."

• My immediate concern is that this sounds like a closed shop. I recall Turki AlAlshikh saying one of his favourite boxers is Roberto Duran, I wonder how a no-name fighter from Panama breaks through in this system? This sounds like a great idea for the short-term problem of the best not fighting the best, but it has the potential to turn into a long-term problem of new fighters languishing in obscurity because of an entrenched top 10.
  • I'm not familiar with how the UFC does things because I don't care for MMA, but I can't help but worry that this new boxing league will inherently favour UK and USA promoters/managers rather than creating a level playing field for the global south.
    • Presumably Top Rank, Golden Boy, Matchroom, and Queensberry get a seat at the top table. Al Haymon turns 70 next year and might decide to get out of boxing if a big enough offer is made.
    • iirc there has been some frustration in coaxing Inoue to fight outside of Japan. And Japanese boxing isn't set up to lend itself to smooth takeovers.
  • It could end up being another schism in an already massively fractured sport. The UFC "runs" MMA in the public Western consciousness, but there are still rival MMA franchises.
    • Assuming the custom undisputed belt that debuted last month was a prototype for similar belts in other divisions, what does that mean for championship lineage? 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.
      • The Japanese Boxing Commission were admirably the last major stalwart against recognising the IBF and WBO. Would they be similiarly intransigent if there was a new Undisputed Belt™? My guess is they acquiesced before so they'll likely do so again.
• 12 weight classes is still too many in my opinion. The sport used to get by just fine with 8. Ideally, there would be no more than 10.
  • Strawweight (105), flyweight (112), bantamweight (118), featherweight (126), lightweight (135), welterweight (147), middleweight (160), light-heavyweight (175), cruiserweight (200 or 210), and heavyweight (∞)
    • At a stretch, a case could be made for bridgerweight. Personally, I'd drop strawweight.
    • One of the big problem with weight-divisions is people not fighting at their natural weight. When you can weigh-in the day before the fight, the strategy is to dehydrate to barely make weight and then rehydrate 10 or 20 pounds in the next 24-36 hours. In the old days, weigh-ins happened the day of the fight. Someone who was 140 lbs on the scales would generally be that size in their day-to-day life and that size in the ring, same as their opponent.
      • Some kind of 'natural weight clause', that contractually stipulates you cannot fluctuate and be more than 'x'% over 'y' weight a week before the fight and during fight-week would be welcome. Random weigh-ins alongside drugs testing would go some way to stopping the damp squib of losing a belt on the scales or an unfair/uneven match-up where one fighter has an obvious size advantage.
      • Being more sensible about what it means to make weight would also level the playing field between "lesser" fighters who already fight at their natural weight and the pros who game the rehydration system.

"In the new series, there would be a requirement for boxers to perform in a minimum number of events per year, a move designed to prevent some of the top boxers from taking prolonged time away from the sport, a cause of frustration among boxing fans."

• This is a great move. The current 1 or 2 fights a year model is a travesty. It keeps boxers out of the public eye and boxing out of the sports pages. This sport should regularly be making headlines, there are more than enough fighters for there to be a great card held somewhere in the world every 1 or 2 weeks.
  • If the 4-belt model exists in tandem with this new league, I would say that everyone should be mandated to fight a minimum of 3 times a year (barring injuries) and at least one of those fights should be a unification bout.
    • Though I suppose the problem then becomes that the inherent level of risk a fighter would be forced to take in their career has quantifiably increased.
  • Ik vraag me af if this league would be committed to the idea of fights happening on Saturday nights. There are a lot of people who would rather spend their Saturday night doing other things than committing to an hours-long card. I'd be interested to see if any research has been done on the viability of weekday-evening or public holiday bouts. They used to be more common in the past and continue to be in Asian countries.
• It's not mentioned anywhere but if this is a return to the glory days, could we see the return of 15 round fights? How would Usyk-Fury have looked if we got 9 more minutes of action? These are the best men the sport has to offer. And they're denied the opportunity to prove that they're every bit as manly as their 20th century counterparts.
  • Currently, to win a 12-round fight you only have to win 7 rounds. That's 21-minutes of work any well-conditioned outboxer should be able to manage. In a 15-round fight, you'd have to win 8 rounds - 24 out of 45 minutes - and survive for an additional two rounds. 15 rounds would give the edge back to in-fighters, who can invest in bodyshots to tire out elusive foes and plan a knockout in the later stages. A lot of the great in-fighters of the past did their best work in the back stretches of a fight, like Frazier knocking down Ali.
    • By being an odd number, 15-round fights would virtually eliminate the unsatisfying draws we see far too often these days.
  • The championship rounds disappeared after the tragic death of Kim Duk-koo, who was knocked out in the 14th round by Ray Mancini. Fighters had died in boxing before. They have died since. If he had died after being knocked out in the 11th, would championship fights be 10 rounds instead? All this posturing provides cover for the real issue that the WBA should've never ranked Kim so highly in the first place.
    • This slippery slope of reducing the length of fights only ends in one way. If 12 rounds are safer than 15, then 10 rounds are safer 12. And 8 rounds are safer than 10. 1 round is safer than 8 rounds of boxing. And what's safer than one round of boxing? Zero rounds of boxing.

Change da world

"Partnerships are also under discussion with some of boxing’s traditional organizations, which control the rights not only to key boxers, but also to highly valuable intellectual property like archival video, historic results and the title belts once held by boxing royalty like Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson."

• You know what would be fantastic addition to Riyadh? The world's first boxing musum. Sure, there are halls of fame in America. But they're smaller in scope than a fully-fledged purpose-built museum. The consolidation of human knowledge and cultural artifacts (including media) is the inevitable direction of travel for sports. Boxing could get ahead of this. Imagine, a place that housed all the most important physical objects in boxing history, complete with an art gallery dedicated to fine art of the noble art. And that this institution, like a boxing-oriented Internet Archive, digitised every single fight ever put to film or tape, every book printed on paper etc and made them available online for public consumption. Future generations of fans, scholars, and historians would have a foundation that would be the envy of not only every other sport, but of every other topic that can be studied.
  • There'd be so many opportunities for in-person activities, like boxing video games (including VR) and screenings of boxing movies/documentaries. What better way to encourage the creation of boxing media worldwide than having a ready-built location for glitzy premieres?
  • Also if there was ever a man with the resources to track down Harry Greb's lost fight films, then Turki AlAlshikh really is our last hope.
• Thomas Hauser wrote late last year that "there are reliable reports that the Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority is laying the groundwork for a new boxing website and sounding out high-profile writers from several countries about coming onboard for dramatically more money than they’re currently being paid. In a world where media coverage of boxing is already limited, that plan, if it comes to fruition, would go a long way toward enabling the Saudi government to control the narrative in the sweet science."
  • Donald McRae chimed in with "You just gotta say no, comrades"
    • Now I'm no high-profile writer so this doesn't even really apply to me but as much as I enjoy being the plucky independent writer, I live in a world where poverty is a death sentence. I'm also old enough to recall Hauser being very critical of HBO until they paid him off.
• There are two big changes this new order could enforce.
  • One is accountability. At the moment, drugs cheats and incompetent/corrupt judges face little to no repercussions. Mr. Alalshikh seemed receptive to the idea of stomping out PEDs. I sincerely hope that he takes these problems seriously. The credibility of the sport has never been very high but this could be the inflection point.
  • The other is fighter safety. Leagues in other sports are responsible for their competitors and it's long overdue that boxing stops distancing itself from that responsibility. If enough people buy into this system, then a well-funded aftercare/retirement program for competitors is a must. It's embarrassing for the sport that greyhound racedogs receive more care when they're finished competing than boxers do.

Money makes the world go round

Should the plan for the boxing league go ahead, a P.I.F. entity called Sela has been earmarked to promote the events, which would be held not just in Saudi Arabia but around the world.

• I'm glad that not all the fights are being held in Saudi Arabia. Not for any ideological reason tbh. But because it ran the same risks as all fights being held in Las Vegas, it starves other cities of high-level boxing. Those undercards when the belts travelled across America and Europe provided lifeblood to gyms and their boxers. When those belts stopped travelling, those gyms started closing in large numbers. The Don King tours of the global south made boxing tangible to people who would otherwise never see it. When those events stopped happening, those countries largely stopped caring about boxing. The wealth has to be spread if the sport is to be sustainable.

That may be followed by an even bigger event at London’s Wembley Stadium featuring the former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua.

• This has nothing to do with anything but nuWembley is one of the most soulless stadiums ever and Old Wembley was terrible for boxing too, the nosebleeds should come with binoculars.
  • It's bad for football too when you consider how terrible the location is. The atmosphere is pin-drop for some England games too but I blame the England Band for lulling players into depressing/boring football with their Pavlovian repertoire.

"The recent heavyweight title fight — which reportedly earned Fury $100 million — was essentially given away to broadcast partners to air for free on the condition that they share some of their revenue with the host nation. Broadcast partners typically spend millions of dollars to acquire such rights."

• I guess this explains why Megogo were able to practically give the fight away for just two cents. But it does not explain why the radio rights negotiations were such a catastrophe, I'm still curious how/why that went wrong.
  • I said in my piece about Usyk-Fury that I think post-fight promotion is neglected. If money is not the biggest priority, at least when trying to initially gain exposure for the sport, one great way to address the lack of public interest is to package fights (and documentaries/previews) for public broadcasters. Putting fights on YouTube is fantastic, but that relies on people searching for it, sharing it, or an algorithm picking it up. Free-to-air television still gets billions of viewers around the world every single day. Muhammad Ali would not have been as big a superstar if he fought under the PPV model.

Who made this ish?

"The project has been under discussion for more than a year, and developed with the help of multiple consultancy firms, including Boston Consulting Group, which helped shape the Saudi-funded LIV Golf series."

• We're all familiar with the old adage: if you want to fix a problem, hire a consulting firm or two.
  • I had a brief foray in consulting and know a lot of consultants, so please forgive my first-hand prejudice. I don't follow golf so I can't speak on the LIV Golf series, for all I know it's a great product.
• Generally speaking, if you believe in capitalism, then monopolies are a bad thing. I'll even contradict myself from earlier and say boxing media being under the control of one entity would cause more harm than good. Healthy competition is good for both participants and consumers. I don't know much about the UFC but I know their fighters get paid considerably less than boxers. Then again, I doubt the fans are asked to pay as much for UFC given how often boxing fans are told to dip into their pockets for PPVs.

In conclusion, lots of interesting things are happening. They could all be good. They could all be bad. But most importantly, they are all interesting. I vastly prefer new and exciting to everything being rote and boring. By anyone's measure, this is the most ambitious and audacious plan for boxing in history. What a time to be alive.