Premier Boxing Champions has prominently positioned itself for participation in a slew of high-profile bouts in the featherweight division by striking a multi-fight extension with Brandon Figueroa (25-1-1, 19 KOs).
Coinciding with the extension, the World Boxing Council has ordered interim champion Figueroa, 27, to fight for the WBC title against Mexico’s world featherweight champion Rey Vargas (36-1-1, 22 KOs).
PBC will stage that bout in the fall, according to a boxing official familiar with the situation.
Former junior featherweight champion Figueroa, of Texas, earned the interim status by scoring a ninth-round knockout of Jessie Magdaleno on May 4 on the Saul “Canelo” Alvarez-Jaime Munguia card in Las Vegas.
Vargas, 33, is coming off a March 8 split draw against England’s Nick Ball (20-0-1, 11 KOs), who then proceeded to win the WBA featherweight belt by defeating Raymond Ford by split decision in Saudi Arabia in the “5 vs 5” tournament won by Queensberry promoter Frank Warren.
Since Ball would have great interest in either settling the draw with Vargas or adding a second 126-pound belt, he obviously lies in wait for the Figueroa-Vargas winner.
More substantially, there’s the increasing likelihood that by next year, Japan’s pound-for-pound king Naoya Inoue (27-0, 24 KOs) will move up to featherweight.
Four-division and two-division undisputed champion Inoue most recently knocked out Mexico’s Luis Nery before 55,000 at the Tokyo Dome, a stirring performance in which Inoue rallied from a first-round knockdown to win by sixth-round TKO.
Figueroa had an easier time with Nery in a 2021 title fight in Southern California, knocking Nery out with a seventh-round body shot.
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