One of the most annoying things to me about boxing today is that once fighters reach the top they generally only fight twice a year for the rest of their careers. This hasn’t always been the case and only really became immensely popular once Floyd Mayweather started doing it.
The logic behind doing it is that you’ll get more money for those two fights because people know your only going to fight twice a year so suddenly your fights are like a rare resource that people are willing to fight and make time for. I don’t believe that the average top fighter makes more by fighting twice a year rather than four times it just takes less effort to get roughly the same payday.
I think only having two fights a year really limits fighters legacies as they can’t have as many top level fights as people did in the past and we sometimes miss out on fights purely because fighters have used up their allocated two fights on lesser opposition. I also think that fighters move to the twice a year model much to early now and we see fighters that are barely past the contender stage wasting their careers. The model worked for Floyd because he built up to becoming a PPV star and was the biggest name in the sport, the majority of boxers doing this model now aren’t stars and won’t become stars if they hide away for most of the year.
The last two problems are that fighters don’t get seen as much because they fight so irregularly and are also not as good because they barely fight. It also doesn’t help that if they get injured before one of their fights they can end up only having one fight in a year which for a boxer just isn’t good enough.
Hopefully as we get further away from Mayweather retiring we start to get boxers be more active and we are already seeing that a bit as Emmanuel Navarrete fights almost every other month as a world champion.
Boxing Fulcrum 