WBO won’t recognize Errol Spence Jnr as title challenger in Sebastian Fundora bout

ORLANDO, Florida – Amid the expectation that unified junior middleweight champion Sebastian Fundora will next meet former three-belt welterweight champion Errol Spence Jnr, only one of the belts will be on the line in the bout.

An official connected to the decision told BoxingScene on Friday that the World Boxing Organization has ruled it will not sanction Fundora-Spence as a world title fight for multiple reasons connected to Spence’s position.

The bout will be allowed to proceed as a non-title fight in the WBO’s eyes, and Fundora will retain the belt by winning.

But if Southern California’s Fundora loses to Spence, the belt will be taken from him and presented to four-division and current World Boxing Association junior middleweight titlist Terence Crawford – who stands now as the WBO’s interim 154-pound belt holder.

Fundora, 21-1-1 (13 KOs), also wears the World Boxing Council belt by virtue of his bloody, narrow victory over Tim Tszyu on March 30 in Las Vegas. The WBC belt is expected to be in play.

The WBO, however, has decided Texas’ Spence, 28-1 (22 KOs), does not meet standards required to fight for its belt for these primary reasons:

– Spence, 34, hasn’t fought since his July 2023 ninth-round technical-knockout loss to Crawford, in which Spence was knocked down three times before the stoppage arrived.

– He is coming off the bad knockout loss and has never fought at junior middleweight.

– He is not ranked among the WBO’s top 15 junior middleweights despite petitioning for that position at the recent WBO Convention in Puerto Rico.

“If [the WBO] allows Spence to fight for the belt, it starts a bad precedent for others,” the official said on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the ruling on a fight that is still in negotiations.

There is no official date or venue for Fundora-Spence, but at this week’s WBC Convention in Hamburg, Germany, Fundora told BoxingScene, “That fight’s next for us.”

Spence appeared in the ring following Fundora’s victory over Tszyu to start hyping the showdown.

Spence has since expressed concerns over how his 2019 Ferrari crash has affected his health and he has also split with Derrick James, Spence’s trainer since his amateur days.

Fundora said he does not expect to fight a diminished version of Spence.

“There’s no reason for anybody to be doubting him. He was a champion for a long time,” Fundora said. “He defended the IBF a couple of times, he unified with [Shawn] Porter, he unified with [Yordenis] Ugas. I don’t know why people are overlooking him. We’re definitely not doing that. We see the same Spence as always, and I think everybody should expect a good fight from him.”

Lance Pugmire is BoxingScene’s senior U.S. writer and an assistant producer for ProBox TV. Pugmire has covered boxing since the early 2000s, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The Athletic and USA Today. He won the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Nat Fleischer Award in 2022 for career excellence.