Will 2025 be the year we finally see Claressa Shields fight Jake Paul?

To cut the suspense, and hopefully temper the fury of anyone wanting an argument, the short and indeed only answer to the question in this article’s headline is no, absolutely not. Chances are neither you nor I will be sitting down to watch Claressa Shields, a woman, share a boxing ring with Jake Paul, a man, this year, or anytime soon, and this spoiler should neither disappoint nor surprise. Instead, any vague talk of it happening – whether instigated by Shields or anyone else – is likely no more than an attempt to grab attention at a time when attention is hard to come by in a market flooded with buyers happy to queue jump. 

This is no less true of the headline of this article; written at the start of January, during the sales. In fact, the only difference between Shields vs. Paul, as a concept, and this article’s manipulative headline is that the pretense of the article was exposed in the opening sentence; nipped in the bud, so to speak. It teased the prospect of the fight happening, yes, but it then just as soon revealed its hand and expressed its true motive. It stated, with speed but no pride, that this was not an attempt to stoke debate but rather a basic, cynical attempt to grab attention at the start of a year which just so happens to follow a year of headline-grabbing fights nobody asked to see yet everybody ultimately watched.  

If, in other words, 2024 established the pattern for boxing going forward, one now has no option but to play by its rules in 2025: you give them what they want, even when they tell you they don’t want it. Or something like that. 

Here, the mention of Shields fighting Paul is, like plenty of the fights we witnessed in 2024, nothing but a thirst trap. It should not be taken seriously, much less explored, and it was used only to highlight how warped our thinking has become in the realm of both content and attention-grabbing fights. 

Regarding the latter, it was three years ago that Shields first called out Paul to share a $100,000 sparring match and the world duly laughed. Two years ago, she then floated the idea of an actual boxing match, and last year people even started coming around to the idea, so fed up were they with Paul playing dress-up as a boxer and doing all he could to fight anyone other than an actual boxer. Now, given everything we witnessed in 2024, the idea of Shields, a woman, one day fighting Paul, a man, is neither as unrealistic nor as funny as it was three years ago. 

“I would beat him in a fight,” Shields said in a recent interview with Overtime Boxing. “The biggest and strongest man don’t won (sic) all the fights. So what’s the difference here? I’ve been boxing for 18 years. He’s got a penis, I’ve got a vagina, I get it. But what about the skills that I have? That doesn’t matter because I’m a woman? He’s got to break me down, he’s got to be able to hit me; I’ve got to be able to break him down, I’ve got to be able to hit him. There are certain things that I can do that he doesn’t even know yet.”

On that final point Shields is not wrong. One look at them both in the ring wearing gloves and you can quickly determine which of the two was born to do it and which of the two does it merely because they are paid a lot of money to do it. Yet one of the two is also a 170-pound woman and the other a 200-pound man and this is about as far as any analysis of Shields vs. Paul will go, at least in this article. 

Better to focus on what makes Shields vs. Paul suddenly seem less absurd this January than it would have seemed this time last year. Rest assured, any newfound intrigue or credibility has little to do with equal rights, or because men and women are now closer in terms of physical strength and athletic prowess than ever before. Rather, if wanting the truth, it has much more to do with an expanding of the imagination and how, in boxing, we have now, as a fan base, become accustomed to seeing spectacles we never believed we would witness, making the abnormal now normal. Indeed, it would feel strange for us to go through the whole of 2025 without at least one fight having us question the morality of the sport and asking ourselves why we continue to watch something that has us often question our own.

If it sells, it makes sense, we are told, and if the front door is not open, simply go through the back, or a side door, or even a window. That, in a nutshell, was the message boxing sent the world in 2024 and through these many openings we were last year greeted by a variety of characters who should have been accosted on entry. We saw, for example, a 58-year-old Mike Tyson return to the ring to fight Jake Paul, a man 31 years his junior, on Netflix. Before that we saw Francis Ngannou, a boxing novice, succumb to one of the most brutal finishes witnessed in 2024 at the hands of Anthony Joshua, a former two-time world heavyweight champion. Worse than those two fights were the countless other instances of influencers or social media celebrities viewing boxing as a place to squat in their pursuit of attention and a twisted form of validation. En masse these men and women conspired to simplify a complex science for an audience fixing for something dumb, while slack-jawed purists discovered that the degradation of a sport is permissible if enough people are willing to watch it. “Loosen up,” they were told. “It’s just a bit of fun.”

Like any trend or habit, you question now how low the sport can stoop in the coming years. If, after all, a junkie develops an inconvenient tolerance to a damaging substance, the only thing to do then is increase the dosage, consume more, or deem it a gateway and find an even more dangerous strand. In boxing, that could mean a few things. It could mean two promoters putting on gloves and at last fulfilling their aching desire to be the star of the show. Or, to bring it back to Shields and Paul, it could just mean a man fighting a woman; something a sport as unscrupulous as this one may see as “timely” or a perfect way of capturing the zeitgeist. 

It would certainly capture the attention of the peanut gallery, a spectacle like that, as well as make all involved an obscene amount of money. It would also represent the final bridge the sport must cross before we return to the days of ancient Rome and the venatio, those battles, usually held at the Colosseum, involving exotic animals like lions, bears, and hippos, either pitted against each other or against humans with weapons, known as venatores.

As we enter 2025 with no rules, no barrier to entry, and engagement very much the name of the game, one wonders what a combat sport like boxing can get away with this year. A battle of the sexes might still be a stretch (especially if the candidates are famous), yet, equally, a spectacle such as that doesn’t seem too far away, either. How can it be when we know now that what is right is secondary to what makes money. How can it be when we can hear the bar scraping the floor and know it is hard, once it touches the ground, for it to be picked up and just as hard for it to go any lower. How can it be when we all watched a 58-year-old Mike Tyson re-enter a boxing ring in 2024 and nobody thought to call the authorities.