Will 2025 be the year women’s boxing discovers its true value?

The birth of women’s boxing as we know it today seemed to coincide with us stumbling through a global pandemic and then dealing with all the uncertainty that naturally followed. It was embraced not necessarily for reasons of equality or because of a newfound appreciation for it, but instead because it made sense, financially, for women’s boxing to now be pushed to the forefront at a time when the men in the sport sought comfort and reassurance and started to doubt their own relevance. They needed to be told everything would be all right, in other words. They needed their hand held. They needed a woman’s touch.

Around that time plenty was being said about women’s boxing. The men who welcomed it – that is, the promoters and TV bosses – all spoke in glowing terms about the quality on display and their own determination to ensure this was no flash in the pan moment for the women’s game. Yet it took a woman – in this case one who had seen and heard it all before – to cut through the platitudes and pandering and get to the heart of the matter. “It’s cheap [women’s boxing], and that’s it,” Jane Couch told me in 2022. “It’s also more exciting because you can make competitive fights on the cheap. You get some dodgy matches now and again, but even when I was fighting you would see girls fighting who should never have been fighting.

“At the bottom level it’s back to the Nineties for the girls just starting out,” added Couch, a pioneer of the women’s game. “You need either a big promoter or a big sponsor to make it work. But then again, it’s exactly the same in men’s boxing, isn’t it? I know men who can’t afford their medical, so can’t fight. The problem, as always, is boxing in general.”

That comment, for good reason, always stuck with me. It was forever on my mind when I heard men in positions of power discuss women’s boxing as though it was anything more than a quick answer to a big problem and a way to slip cut-price “world title fights” onto cards for the satisfaction of television networks. It also had me wondering what would happen to the progress of women’s boxing once the sport itself got back to its feet or, as we have seen recently, a fresh pot of money emerged and there was no longer the incentive to do things on the cheap. 

Thanks to Saudi Arabia, you see, all boxing’s problems are now apparently fixed and boxers are getting paid exactly what they want and deserve. Similarly, fights that were always too expensive to imagine are now being made everywhere you look and all the headaches the sport’s promoters experienced not long ago, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, have now been soothed, at least temporarily, by a golden handshake and the swallowing of something; maybe a pill or maybe their pride. Now they have Riyadh Season. Now they have Turki Alalshikh. Now they have the ability to play promoter without all the risks of old, turning the profession into more of a game than a cutthroat business. This, of course, allows each of them to get creative, have fun. It means they can make the fights they have long wanted to make, without worrying too much about the outlay, and it means they have all been helped to step over – or perhaps out of – the huge holes that were starting to appear in their plans a few years ago. 

The only question now has to do with where women’s boxing fits into this great overhaul of the sport. Does it now benefit from the spoils the same way the men’s game has and therefore accelerate the race to equality many of the females, and indeed males, were driving with such passion during the time of Covid-19? Or does it instead distract and maybe detract from that? Does the ability of promoters to put on the fights they want to see without the risk of losing everything now trump their desire to give women’s boxing the platform they once told us it merited? 

Certainly, it stands to reason that events taking place in Saudi Arabia won’t be awash with female talent for the foreseeable future. There are, yes, signs that this could possibly change, but for now the chief beneficiaries of Saudi cash will be the men in the sport, particularly the famous ones. These are the boxers we see line up on fight cards out there and these are the ones who are all of a sudden getting the kind of paydays they could only dream of when starting out. 

The women, on the other hand, continue to fight with the same spirit and intensity, yet are now having to search a little harder for attention and opportunities. There was a sense of this when the Alalshikh-financed Ring magazine hosted its awards ceremony earlier this month and a few female boxers took to social media to question why it seemed a mostly male-dominated affair. Added to that, you now see a lot more female boxers arguing about the business side of the sport publicly, a sign, perhaps, that they are either wondering where their slice of the pie has gone or simply fearing that the chasm between them and their male counterparts is likely to increase rather than close given the sport’s recent cash injection. 

Still, the good news is that on March 12 in London – at the Royal Albert Hall, no less – there will again be a showcase of women’s boxing, headlined by a welterweight title fight between Natasha Jonas and Lauren Price. This show, an all-female affair, is a repeat of the 2022 show Boxxer and Sky Sports hosted, which on that occasion took place at the O2 Arena and was headlined by Claressa Shields and Savannah Marshall. Two years on from that night, and with different characters now doing the selling, it will be interesting to compare the success of these two events and discover whether there is a genuine hunger for this type or offering to be more than just a novelty. 

“When Jane Couch was boxing, we had Christy Martin and Laila Ali, and women’s boxing had a bit of a boom time, but then it disappeared for a while,” said Joe Gallagher, the coach of Natasha Jonas. “Now we’ve just had this great golden era and are on to the next. 

“I think in the last 12 months, you look at the great fights we’ve had, like Natasha Jonas vs. Mikaela Mayer and Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano, and you can see that women’s boxing is still there and still doing well. It’s just not really had the big headline act in England to compare with what we were getting accustomed to. 

“But we’ve always said that it would take time for the divisions to find that strength and depth of talent to keep the big fights rolling all the time. I think that’s half the problem, to be honest. I also think we’re coming to a stage now where fighters like Katie and Natasha are nearing the end and it’s up to the next lot of young guns to get their opportunity and take it. You’re now looking at people like Caroline Dubois, Sandy Ryan, Gabriela Fundora, et cetera.”

Fundora, who won The Ring award for Female Fighter of the Year, was, along with Taylor vs. Serrano II on Netflix, definitely the story in women’s boxing in 2024. Yet, to Gallagher’s point, there were other stories to indicate either a changing of the guard or even deeper issues at play. Take Seniesa Estrada, for example. She retired at the age of 32, having won 26 consecutive fights, and elected to do so because she couldn’t release the heaviness from her shoulders and the dark cloud above her head. She mentioned depression as a reason for getting out, and she also alluded to being frustrated with the business side of boxing, with the two things not necessarily unconnected. “It’s a difficult decision,” said Estrada, the former minimumweight champion. “I didn’t just wake up one morning and say, ‘I feel like retiring.’ There’s been a lead up to it for the past few years. Now that I finally am retired, I feel very at peace and happy. It’s a feeling that I haven’t felt in a very long time.”

In England, where women’s sport is regularly pushed by Sky Sports, the picture still has some colour and some promise. Of all its major promoters, Ben Shalom, the one attached to Sky Sports, is the least involved with Riyadh Season and Turki Alalshikh and therefore has a far greater incentive to invest in female talent and host all-female nights like March 7. 

“That first women’s night that we did [October 15, 2022] became the most-watched female event ever on Sky Sports, which really shows the power of women’s boxing and where we’ve got to,” Shalom said this week. “I always think of Katie Taylor, Natasha Jonas and Savannah Marshall as the reason why the sport is so big. So, to be able to be sitting here today with Olympians from London, all the way to Paris, it’s phenomenal. Women’s boxing is a force to be reckoned with. The numbers speak for themselves. This night on March 7 will be something to remember.”

While it is true that nights like March 7, and before that October 15, should and will be remembered for the landmark events they are, the important thing for female boxers in a time of transition is that they are the ones remembered and that they are the ones whose value in a male-dominated world becomes more than just monetary. Otherwise, the words of Jane Couch, a woman, will continue to mean and reveal more than all the words of the men in the sport combined.