Why don’t fighters want to fight anymore?

As far as Ryan Garcia was concerned, one fight in Las Vegas was not enough. Maybe that was because the one fight he had — a second-round stoppage of Conor Benn — was brief and undemanding, or maybe it was because Garcia, following a recent spell of inactivity on account of a drugs ban, is now intent on making up for lost time. 

Either way, Garcia wasn’t content with just one fight, so arranged himself another. This time no ring was required, either. He wasn’t even wearing gloves. This time the aim, rather than to defend a title, was merely to drain whatever energy remained from the Benn blowout 24 hours earlier. For that, all he needed was his “homie” and two hands. “We just started brawling in the room,” he revealed on “The Ariel Helwani Show” the following Monday. “He wanted that work, so I gave him it, bare-knuckle. Easy work.”

Except for a sore hand, Garcia came away from his weekend of “easy work” relatively unscathed. That then enabled him to start plotting his next fight, one he would like to happen in December. “Why not?” he said, perhaps knowing some would be shocked by what is a quick turnaround by today’s standards. “I wouldn’t call it a tune-up, but I don’t want to get caught off guard. I don’t want to wait until May to fight. Why do I have to wait until May? I have no bruises, no hits to the head. Why can’t I fight? I’ll give the fans a little treat.”

These days that’s exactly what it would be: a treat. It is a treat to see any world champion box three times in a calendar year, and that, should he get his way, will be precisely what Ryan Garcia, the current WBC welterweight champion, will have managed to achieve in 2026. Fight just once more this year and Garcia will have boxed in February, September and December. He will then, on the basis of activity alone, have every right to claim he has been more productive in 2026 than most other world champions. 

For the sake of context, we’re now nine months into the year and Naoya Inoue and Oleksandr Usyk, the sport’s two best pound-for-pound boxers, have boxed just once. The same goes for David Benavidez, Shakur Stevenson, Jesse Rodriguez, Dmitry Bivol, and Jaron Ennis, all of whom are familiar, if not satisfied, with that rate of activity. In fact, of the 10 boxers who comprise Uncrowned’s latest pound-for-pound rankings, only Jai Opetaia, the WBA “regular” cruiserweight champion, has so far boxed more than once in 2026, and only Benavidez and Bivol look set to box again before the year is out. 

That might be a cause for alarm if it wasn’t now the norm. 

“It’s getting worse and worse,” says Brad Goodman, the Hall-of-Fame matchmaker whose relationship with Bob Arum’s Top Rank promotional stable stretches all the way back to 1983. “It’s not getting easier, the matchmaking. There are fewer opponents out there and it’s just not the same. It’s not as enjoyable as it was in the ’80s and ’90s. The fighters aren’t as good, either. There are only maybe half a dozen guys who could have competed in bygone eras, and I’m afraid that’s linked to inactivity. 

“A lot of the inactivity is due to the lack of TV interest today. Now, for better or worse, it’s a streaming-service sport. They don’t do weekly fights anymore, so opportunities aren’t there. Nowadays guys are also protecting their zeroes. In years gone by, the unbeaten record wouldn’t mean so much because there was a lot more activity and defeats were inevitable. The money is completely different now, too. A lot of these guys are making a ton of money and getting spoiled. Therefore, the philosophy is simple: let me get the easiest fight for the most amount of money.”

Matchmaker Robert Diaz, who spent 15 years with Golden Boy Promotions and worked closely with the likes of Marco Antonio Barrera and Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez, is every bit as bewildered as Goodman and anyone else who makes a living convincing fighters to fight. 

“Julio César Chávez, in his prime, would fight the big fights in America, but even between his big fights he would go back to Mexico and take these little, insignificant fights, maybe for not even a lot of money,” says Diaz. “It kept him busy. It created that rhythm and sharpness he became famous for. This is a guy who had over 100 fights.

“I don’t think we will see anything close to that again. I’m not even sure we will see a fighter do Canelo numbers [68 pro fights and counting] again. Although he turned pro young at 15, Canelo has been very active, even as a top-level fighter. He’s one of the last guys I can remember who had three title fights in a year at that level [in 2021].”

While boxing is not purely a numbers game, often numbers tend to mean more than words. This is especially true in a sport that encourages its participants to value the latter above the former and whose participants now regard the concept of “legacy” as something passé; a fantasy of the poor, ignorant and punchy.

“Salvador Sánchez won the world [featherweight] title, made nine defenses of it, and then died at 23. That says it all,” says Diaz. “The fan might say, ‘Yeah, but they were being paid s*** back then, they had to do that. Now they’re making more.’ But are the fighters today being spoiled? That is the question. Are they becoming lazy?

“I’m all for the fighters making money for putting their lives on the line, but there still needs to be a balance. Legacy is important — that’s why we remember great fighters. Will we even remember these world champions today? I’m not sure we will.”

Thirty years ago, Sheffield’s Ryan Rhodes completed three British title fights in the space of just 90 days. In doing so he won the British light middleweight title outright in record time — that is, quicker than any other boxer in history — and got to keep the belt for life. 

Now, three decades later, it is likely most boxing fans, at least those in America, remember Rhodes as the plucky Brit who unsuccessfully challenged “Canelo” in Guadalajara in 2011. However, the majority of British boxing fans remember Rhodes differently. They remember him not as a fighter who fell just short at world level, but as someone whose activity rate as a 20-year-old led to him doing what no fighter had ever done before. 

“I loved being active,” says Rhodes, who won the British title when beating Paul “Silky” Jones in December 1996, then defended it the following February and March (against Peter Waudby and Del Bryan respectively). “Not only being active but being fighting fit and fighting ready. It’s all well and good being in the gym and sparring, but it’s totally different fighting under the lights in an arena, where everything is on the line. 

“I always thought it was a massive plus that I was active, fighting regularly, and being on the big cards. I had a few dips, where I might have changed promoters, or suffered a back injury, which was a constant issue for me. But if you’re not injured, and if you’re not being held back due to the sport’s politics, a fighter should be ready to go four or five times a year. Now, as a promoter, that’s what I’m trying to do with my fighters, because I know how important it is. Activity makes them happy, and a happy fighter is a dangerous fighter.”

Later on in his career Rhodes was guided to a European title by Dave Coldwell, someone who has worn near enough every hat there is to wear in professional boxing: fighter, trainer, manager, matchmaker, and promoter. In short, Coldwell has witnessed the changes in the way a fighter is built from a variety of angles. He knows as well as anyone that a fighter winning and then defending any title twice within just 90 days is inconceivable in 2026.

“It’s so frustrating,” says Coldwell, who also led Tony Bellew to the WBC cruiserweight title in 2016. “The fighters I work with as a coach and as a manager, they all want to fight. But the problem for the ones just starting out is that unlike in the past, when you’d have six or eight fights in that first year, we don’t have that now. We don’t have that because unless they are a superstar prospect with a big promoter, they’re not getting the dates.

“Moses Itauma, Ben Whittaker, Pat Brown, guys like that, they can fight fairly often, but that’s only because the promoter has identified them as their next star and wants to get them to headline fights as quickly as they can. They are alright, but everybody else is in trouble. The promoter has many fighters and only so many dates. Basically, your regular prospect now is getting a maximum of four fights a year when starting out, and that just doesn’t cut it.”

When Moses Itauma met Mike Tyson in 2023, the first thing Tyson wanted to know about the young heavyweight billed as “The Next Mike Tyson” was how many fights he planned on having in his first year as a professional. Quick to raise his hand, Itauma, who’d turned pro that January, said he hoped to have eight, thinking eight was the right answer. “Eight quality fights,” he stressed, “not eight bums,” to which Tyson, his teacher, said, “No, any fight with a fighter is quality. Because anything can happen in there. Anything. There is no such thing as ‘bums.'”

As well as avoiding “bums,” Itauma successfully avoided two other things during the formative stage of his professional career. One, he managed to avoid going the eight- or 10- or 12-round distance, and two, he managed to avoid a crisis until, alas, it was too late. By the time it had arrived, Itauma was too exhausted to ride it out and too inexperienced to know how. By the time it had arrived, Filip Hrgovic, his opponent for the IBF world heavyweight title, had already come to realize that Itauma’s main weakness was his impatience — both in the ring and in his development.

“When you look at Mike Tyson and how active he was compared to Moses, it’s night and day,” says Rhodes who, like Itauma, challenged unsuccessfully for his first world title (against Otis Grant in 1997) at the age of 21. “He probably fought a third of the amount of fights Tyson fought at that stage. Moses, at 21, is already down to two fights a year.

“Heavyweights don’t fight as often, I know, but they should still be fighting three or four times a year. Moses is a great talent, but he is still limited in terms of experience. That can mean rounds, it can mean fights, or it can mean styles of opponents. There is so much more for him to learn, but you can only learn by doing it. The more you do it, the more comfortable you feel doing it. It’s like riding a bike or driving a car.”

In his first year as a pro, Itauma boxed seven times, while in the 12 months prior to boxing for his first world title (this past August against Hrgovic) he boxed just twice: a first-round knockout of Dillian Whyte and a fifth-round knockout of Jermaine Franklin. Tyson, on the other hand, boxed 15 times in his first year as a pro, then boxed 12 times the very same year he became the youngest world heavyweight champion in history. 

“Back in the day you’d have a lot more fights to build a fighter,” says Coldwell. “But I don’t feel as though fighters are built for longevity anymore. They’re just rushed through to get a title and then become a headliner for a TV network. That’s ultimately to their detriment, because they haven’t learnt the fundamentals. Back in the day, before you fought a champion, you’d go in with guys of all different styles — a runner, someone who comes forward, southpaw, orthodox. It would develop a fighter. Then, when they reached the top level, they could stay there for a long time. These days you don’t see much of that development going on. Even the ones who do seem developed, like Shakur Stevenson, are content to reach the top and box just once a year. It’s a bit s***, to be honest. 

“I’m now going to say something that won’t be popular,” Coldwell adds with a sigh. “The problem here lies a lot with the managers and the boxers themselves, because they want big money early. You’ve got prospects wanting to be on really good money, and therefore the so-called learning fights against opponents expecting to lose are costing the promoter a lot of money. So the promoter can’t afford to bang them out every eight weeks in learning fights. It’s too expensive. 

“So, what do you want as a fighter? Do you want the grounding and the schooling so that long-term you are a better fighter? Or do you want the money now at the cost of your education? That’s a huge problem in this sport. A lot of the prospects expect serious money for easy fights and their promoters simply cannot afford to entertain that as a business model.” 

Chances are, if the option they choose is quick cash, a fighter’s progress will then have to be expedited for the fighter to become a pay-per-view headliner. This allows their promoter to pay them what they expect to be paid, albeit at a cost. The cost, in this instance, will be their visibility, for nothing alienates a fighter from the public like a paywall. 

“I just wish the fighters knew they were damaging their overall career and legacy,” says Diaz. “It’s always been about money, it’s always been prizefighting, and it’s always been important for them to provide for their families. But at least there once seemed to be this idea that while money was important, legacy meant more — or just as much. There was a year [1993] when Oscar [De La Hoya] fought nine times. Tyson, when coming up, fought once a month. That’s how you build a brand and a following. 

“A few years back the purses got so high that you couldn’t pay a fighter more than once a year. Competitors were telling your fighters, ‘What you make over there in five fights, you can make here in one.’ The fighter then saw that they would get more for less, and take less damage, and a lot of fighters believed it to be true and for the best. However, when they were fighting just once a year, they had a lot of money but a lot of free time on their hands and they got in a lot of trouble. They would then return and be rusty and their timing would be off because they had been away so long.”

In order for a fighter to be built correctly, there must first be the right infrastructure in place. There must be a food chain, with certain diets required for certain prospects, and there must be enough vegetables to go round. In other words, every prospect needs journeymen. 

“Unfortunately, after the pandemic a lot of journeymen or opponents went to do a normal job,” explains Christian Cherchi, a manager and matchmaker with leading Italian promotional outfit OPI 82. “They wanted more security. Even now, in Europe, if you have a boxer at a lower level, he is waiting for a fight for some minor title.

“It’s more difficult now to do a four-round fight or a six-round fight at the beginning of the career of a prospect because we simply don’t have the opponents anymore. They want more money than before, but the problem is there is less money at that level than before. At least that’s the case in Italy. Every time we put on a show it’s a miracle.”

Frankly, any successful show not financed by Middle Eastern money ought to be deemed a miracle these days. For the past few years, in fact, we have been lulled into a false sense of security by the embrace of Saudi financier Turki Alalshikh and Riyadh Season to such an extent that it is quite easy to believe: A) the sport has never been healthier, and B) a world champion fighting once a year is perfectly normal behavior. Both, sadly, are fallacies perpetuated by those for whom perpetuating fallacies is beneficial. 

“The problem is, the money they spent, and where it is coming from, they don’t have to make a profit,” says Cherchi. “If we keep it real, the purse would be real. But now, because they don’t have to make a profit, nothing about the sport is real. The purses certainly are not real. The situation right now is like this, but I don’t know how long it will last. At some point it will finish. Right now, the only ones making money are those lucky fighters at the top level. Even then, look at someone like Keyshawn Davis. He turned down almost three million dollars [$2.14 million] from Top Rank [to challenge WBO welterweight champion Devin Haney] to wait for another fight. He actually turned it down. It’s crazy.

“To keep your business alive, you have to work with reality. This is not reality. Before, when there was HBO and Showtime [broadcasting boxing], there was money, of course, but there was no overpaying for no reason. You would get paid a certain amount if you fought at a certain level and then you would get guys like De La Hoya and Roy Jones and Felix Trinidad who got paid superstar money. But it was never unreal money. They were never getting paid more than they were worth. Really, it’s an illusion at the moment. You don’t know how long it will last.”

“I’m a fan of Turki because he has put on great fights; fights that people wanted to see,” says Goodman. “But if there was no Turki involved, do you think Eddie Hearn, Top Rank, Golden Boy or PBC would be paying [Artur] Beterbiev and Bivol 10 million [dollars] apiece? The reason we’ve been getting these fights is because Turki is overpaying them. You could have paid them [Beterbiev and Bivol] three or five million and I am sure they would have taken the fight. Why have you got to pay them 10 million? Now when you offer fighters a reasonable, market-value purse, they don’t take it because they’re spoiled. They’re willing to sit out and get old because they’ve already got their big payday and they can live off that.”

In addition to Saudi cash spoiling fighters and dragging both them and their fights away from their natural habitat, it could be argued that the sport’s visibility has been hurt by a lack of competition between promoters, as well as a sudden scarcity of platforms, with many promoters now battling for the same limited number of dates on DAZN, an app. Worst of all, there is a feeling that the trend of big-name boxers boxing just once a year has become harmful to both the popularity of these boxers and, in broader terms, the sport. How, after all, can any boxer expect to generate attention or a following when they only show their face in public once every 12 months? 

“We don’t have any superstars after Canelo,” says Goodman. “Guys who can gain some attention are guys like David Benavidez, if he fights more than once a year, and ‘Bam’ Rodriguez, even though he is a little guy [a bantamweight]. They can be attractions. But, once Canelo leaves, there is nobody on that level in America because nobody has been really built. Look at the [headline] fights we have in Vegas now: Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn and Teofimo Lopez vs. [Rolando] ‘Rolly’ Romero. Can you imagine if those guys fought in the ’80s, or the ’90s, or even the early 2000s? Those two fights would be nothing more than undercard fights. It’s depressing.”

“The sport suffers,” Coldwell agrees. “You need your big names boxing regularly to keep the interest of the general public. Out of sight, out of mind. If the superstars only box once a year, you don’t have many big shows and you don’t have many ways of attracting fans. Fans will then stop you in the street and say, ‘It’s gone a bit quiet, hasn’t it? It’s not what it used to be.’ They say that because every few weeks there used to be a big fight. There are still shows every week now, we all know that, but they don’t feature names people are aware of. You try convincing people there is boxing every week on DAZN or whatever and they’ll say, ‘Oh, really? I’ve not heard anything about it.’ It’s a visibility issue. 

“Also, the bottom line is, the money boxers are demanding is restricting their activity. They’re putting an unrealistic value on themselves, which is stopping certain fights from happening. But, if there’s a reluctance to pay what the fighters want, surely the fight isn’t worth what they think it is. This usually only dawns on a fighter when one of their fights goes to purse bids and they see the true value of what that fight is worth, with promoters bidding for it. That’s when they get a shock. A reality check. It’s also then that they usually pull out of the fight and say, ‘No, it’s not worth it.’ But that’s the thing: your purse might not be the same as what you’ve been paid before, but it’s the true value of the fight.”

Last week Hamzah Sheeraz became the latest fighter to withdraw from a fight following the result of a purse bid when his WBO super middleweight title defense against mandatory challenger Janibek Alimkhanuly received a winning bid of just $1,001,809. As champion, Sheeraz was entitled to 75% of that amount — let’s call it $750,000 — but viewed this purse as insufficient; not enough, that is, to risk fighting a tricky southpaw who, in 2025, tested positive for the performance-enhancing drug meldonium. Instead of fighting Alimkhanuly, Sheeraz opted to dump the belt, therefore ending his reign after just one defense.

Of course, Sheeraz’s two previous fights — low-key affairs against Simon Zachenhuber and Alem Begić — took place in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where he would have been paid not only handsomely but, relative to his market value, unrealistically.

“It has been getting out of hand, the pay,” concedes Diaz. “It has happened because of the egos of promoters. They want all the fighters to join them and they will pay whatever it takes. But that is not sustainable. We have seen that. Eventually no business can stay afloat if you spend more than you bring in. Today it’s the Saudis, but before that it was PBC and it was Matchroom. They have all entered the market at some point and paid over the odds to make a name. They have all contributed to messing up the market. 

“When Canelo did his huge deal with DAZN in 2018 [a five-year, 11-fight deal worth $365 million], it was historical and great for one fighter, but it immediately threw off the market. Because when the opponents started hearing about it, they said, ‘Well, if Canelo is making $35 million, I’ve got to make four or eight [million dollars].’ Then one fighter came back and said: ‘I’ll fight Canelo but I want $20 million.’ People started acting like money was nothing.”

More recently we have seen Dana White and TKO/Zuffa Boxing enter the sport and, with the help of Alalshikh, throw around the sort of cash capable of enticing fighters to sign with them. Not just that, they have even gone so far as to introduce a new world title to an already crowded room and reshape the Ali Act.

Yet, for all White has said and promised since his arrival on the scene, still nothing resonates today quite like the speech he delivered to wide-eyed participants of season one of “The Ultimate Fighter” back in 2005. “Do you want to be a fighter?” White famously asked his cast of mixed martial artists that year. “It’s not all signing autographs and banging broads when you get out of here. It’s no fun, man. It’s a job like any other job. So, the question is: Do you want to be a f***ing fighter?”

“The world has changed,” says Cherchi. “I see more boxers now doing boxing as something to do alongside their self-promotion on Instagram. We thought it would be the other way around when social media started to enter our lives, but I actually think some boxers, world champions even, now see themselves as influencers first. The boxing they just do to stay in the news and relevant. I see some boxers who box because they want to win titles and they really love the sport, but I also see some boxers, at all kinds of levels, who box only because they want to be famous. They don’t want to fight real fights.”

If it’s true that boxing has a way of reflecting society, perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. After all, not a day goes by when we aren’t being sold a future of ease and convenience and told our lives will be improved at the small cost of our humanity — all that suffering, all that learning. 

Our habits have even changed in readiness. Now we click, we scroll, we swipe, and we sacrifice our autonomy. We stay inside, we order to our door things we used to cook or collect ourselves, and we choose distractions over the pain of thinking. We look down, away, disengage. We sit, knee bouncing; permanently poised. We expect. We refresh. We seek shortcuts; the easy option. We hold out our hands. We think we are special. We tell the world. 

If then we are given the choice not to work, or in this instance fight, the new human instinct is to take it, thus creating a culture of inactivity and indifference. That doesn’t mean we have a shortage of human beings with a desire to stand up and fight, by the way. It just means that in a colorless world of convenience and too many options, there might, due to a lack of education and interest, no longer be an audience prepared to watch them do it. Only then of course, when that happens, will fighters realize what it was they were fighting for.