Eimantas Stanionis and Shakhram Giyasov agree to deal, WBA says date TBA

Sometimes an impending deadline is the best catalyst for action.

That proved to be true for the fight between WBA welterweight titleholder Eimantas Stanionis and mandatory challenger Shakhram Giyasov. After negotiations had failed to produce an agreement, the WBA was scheduled to hold a purse bid on November 19.

But instead of holding a purse bid, the WBA announced that Stanionis and Giyasov have agreed to a deal. This news was first reported by Jake Donovan of RingTV.com.

Per the WBA, the date is TBA: “The contracts and details about the fight […] will be sent in due time […] with the confirmation of the date, venue and other related elements.”

The fight was initially ordered on September 19, but the camps were not able to reach a deal after a month. That led to purse bid being called, which was originally supposed to be held on November 8, then was postponed until November 19 in order to allow more time for both teams to negotiate.

Stanionis became the WBA’s secondary “regular” titleholder by virtue of his April 2022 split decision win over Radzhab Butaev. He made his first defense a little over two years later, winning a unanimous decision over Gabriel Maestre on the May 2024 undercard of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez vs. Jaime Munguia. Stanionis was then elevated to the primary titleholder after Terence Crawford vacated his WBA belt in August.

Stanionis, a 30-year-old from Kaunas, Lithuania, is 15-0 (9 KOs).

Giyasov, 16-0 (9 KOs), is a 31-year-old originally from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, and now fighting out of Brooklyn, New York. He was the welterweight silver medalist in the 2016 Olympics and turned pro in 2018.

Giyasov scored some early victories over a pair of recognizable, if faded, names: Emanuel Taylor (UD10) and Darleys Perez (KO1), both in 2019. More recently, he won a pair of elimination bouts to earn this opportunity, outpointing the 27-0 Harold Eduardo Calderon in June 2023 and taking an 11th-round unanimous technical decision over Pablo Cesar Cano in February. In July, Giyasov took a split decision over Miguel Parra.

David Greisman, who has covered boxing since 2004, is on Twitter @FightingWords2 and @UnitedBoxingPod. He is the co-host of the United Boxing Podcast. David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” is available on Amazon.