UFC president Dana White has not only dipped his toe into the sport of boxing but is now set to make a gargantuan splash.
It was announced earlier today that the CEO of MMA’s flagship organisation has formed a partnership with Turki Alalshikh to introduce a new boxing promotion.
Alalshikh, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority in Saudi Arabia, has acted as a power broker behind many of the sport’s biggest events over the past 18 months.
Under his Riyadh Season banner, the Saudi boxing chief has, perhaps most notably, delivered two heavyweight encounters between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury.
But now, Alalshikh is set to work alongside White in a bid to restructure boxing as we know it, potentially even removing a degree of influence from the four major sanctioning bodies.
In the UFC, White has created a model whereby each fighter, at least for the most part, is given an equal opportunity to climb up the rankings.
With boxing, however, a fighter’s progression towards world level is largely dictated by the WBC, IBF, WBO and WBA.
Wishing to eradicate this complexity from the sport, White has teased that, soon enough, there will no longer be four titles but instead one major belt per division.
“There’s zero speculation on the format,” White told The Ring. “The best fight the best – you work your way up the rankings and, once somebody breaks into the top five, there’s no question who the best five guys in the world are in each weight class.
“Once somebody holds that belt, you don’t need three letters in front of that belt. Whoever has that belt is the best in the world at that weight class. It’s a very simple model.”
With Alalshikh now owning the Ring Magazine, it would appear that the belt White is referring to is, indeed, the Ring Magazine title.
Involved in Alalshikh and White’s business deal, meanwhile, are TKO – the company that owns both the UFC and WWE – and Sela, a powerful Saudi entertainment and hospitality organisation.
Quite what this new partnership means for the rest of the sport’s major players remains to be seen, but ultimately, it would seem that Alalshikh and White are in the process of establishing a revolutionary boxing league.
