The year 2024 was highly eventful for the boxing world with plenty of quality fights and talking points. The BoxingScene team wonder how it will ultimately be remembered.
Has boxing had a good year?
Kieran Mulvaney: Define good. It crowned an undisputed heavyweight champion, before one of the sanctioning bodies decided the title belonged to someone the champion had already defeated. More than 80 million people watched a fight on Netflix; unfortunately, it was a fight between a not-very-good boxer and a 58-year-old shell of a former champion. And there were plenty of good fights, some of which were due to the largesse of the Saudi regime; but the way so many in the sport lined up to take that regime’s money and offer their unqualified praise to boxing’s latest and richest thug-in-chief was humiliating and shameful.
Lucas Ketelle: It did. Great fights were made. The thing now is the lulls. We have a mega card, but then there’s a lot of waiting before the next one. I hope we can get a slightly more reasonable schedule in the future. Programs like ProBox TV, Big Time Boxing USA and OTX Boxing have really carried the middle-class of boxing and given a refreshing new spin on meaningful contender bouts that should be mentioned as well. (Disclosure: ProBox TV owns BoxingScene.)
Owen Lewis: Does it matter outside our pugilistic bubble? Boxing put on a bevy of mouthwatering matchups in 2024, including Usyk-Fury I and II, Taylor-Serrano II, and Beterbiev-Bivol. The top five pound-for-pound fighters (mine: Usyk, Inoue, Crawford, Rodriguez, Beterbiev) are stronger than they’ve been in years, maybe in more than a decade. And yet the most prominent event of the year volunteered a 58-year-old Mike Tyson to show his ass to the Netflix cameras before letting an influencer beat him up in front of a horrifyingly large audience. The sport also continued to sell itself out to the murderous Saudi Arabian regime with greater speed and willingness than even Turki Alalshikh and his bosses could have dreamed. We enjoyed fistic fury of the highest quality this year, but we can’t tell our friends about it and have them take us seriously.
Matt Christie: On the surface, yes. But the sport has suffered in several major territories thanks to fighters now waiting around to get the call from the Middle East. Also consider what the most-watched fight was. If 2024 was the year when Netflix opted to move into the boxing market, and deemed a fight between 58-year-old Mike Tyson and 27-year-old Jake Paul was the best way to pull in the punters, then the sport still has an awful lot of work to do.
Declan Warrington: No. It’s rarely been dull, but the price paid for seeing two of the most appealing contests of all – Tyson Fury-Oleksandr Usyk, and Artur Beterbiev-Dmitry Bivol – is the extent to which so many other fight scenes have stalled. One of the most appealing match-ups in the US, Devin Haney-Ryan Garcia, involved one fighter, Garcia, worryingly struggling with his mental health, failing to make weight, and later testing positive for a banned substance. In September Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, the sport’s highest-profile figure, fought Edgar Berlanga, his least appealing opponent for years. Joshua Buatsi-Anthony Yarde was expected to be staged in the UK – instead, the British fight scene has been neglected while Matchroom, Queensberry Promotions and Boxxer prioritize the riches on offer in Saudi Arabia. Las Vegas also hasn’t been the hive of activity it typically would be. The Saudi Arabian influence is doing more harm than good.
Jason Langendorf: As always in boxing, the good must be taken with a heaping helping of the bad. Both Usyk-Fury fights, the rise of Bam Rodriguez, Inoue’s continued world rampage and the grit and glory of Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano were among the pegs on which boxing could hang its fedora in 2024. But amateur boxing continues to be underfunded, the biggest pro fight of the year matched a YouTuber and a dude nearly ready to begin collecting social security checks, and the sport’s power brokers haven’t been able to line up fast enough to kiss Alalshikh’s, uh, ring and plunge into the tainted Saudi money pipeline. Fans may be fatigued by the criticism constantly lobbed from press row, but boxing has an uncanny knack for making itself a colossal target and wandering squarely into the line of fire.
Lance Pugmire: Yes it did. I, along with many others in this country, lack interest in visiting Saudi Arabia, but the fights put on there were entertaining, historic and better than what we’ve had here in quite a while. Hopefully, promoters and fighters can grasp how well these types of matchups would fare in the West and embrace the added earnings of live-gate and maximum pay-per-view attention. As always in this sport, the divide between common-sense thinking and boxing thinking remains separated by a wide and stubborn chasm.
Tris Dixon: I’m loath to be overly negative, but critical thought is also healthy – and when you see the potential of the sport, not least on Netflix, you realize how much bigger and better it can be. I still think there are key things that need to be looked at, including event timings and main event start times, the overall flow of a promotion/show and the quality and depth of some of the cards. Of course, I have wider concerns, too, but if boxing sticks to what it does/should do best, it will be just fine, and there were just enough signs that it can do that in 2024.
Eric Raskin: By narrow split decision, I’ll say yes. It was a mix of pros and cons: Great fights were made, but they often took place in sterile Riyadh as even-dirtier-than-usual money flowed through the sport; the heavyweight championship was unified, and immediately one piece of it was stripped away; Netflix got involved in boxing, but perhaps as a one-time-only experiment built around a cynical sideshow; Amazon Prime also got involved, but not to an extent that allowed PBC to re-find its footing. In the end, though, it’s the quality of the fights and the fighters that matters most, and there was more to celebrate than complain about on those fronts in 2024.
Elliot Worsell: If success in this context is defined solely by big fights taking place and world-class boxers getting paid the money they deserve for putting their lives at risk, the answer is yes. If, however, success is determined by more than that – and it always should be – the answer is categorically no.
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