With the rise of Turki Alalshikh as the biggest power broker in boxing, there is hope among a lot of the sport’s fans and media that the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority can bring at least a sense of uniformity to the business side of boxing, which is often described as sort of a lawless “Wild West.” (Muslims worldwide can surely see the irony in non-Muslims wishing Saudi Arabia would bring law and order to the West.)

To a sizable chunk of the combat sports community, the most problematic of boxing’s many problems — or at least the easiest one to identify and articulate — is an overabundance of championship belts. It is a byproduct of an overabundance of sanctioning bodies that weigh boxing down with audacious greed, selfish agendas, alleged corruption, and gross incompetence.

The entirety of the scourge of sanctioning bodies is enough to write a few books. As for the championships: there are a lot. Even if you just stick to the four major recognized sanctioning bodies — the WBC, WBA, IBF, and WBO — there are 17 or 18 weight classes, four world champions per weight class (since each sanctioning body has its own titles), plus a collection of interim and regional and sometimes-inexplicable secondary champions littered across the landscape, such as the WBC international cruiserweight title, the WBA gold lightweight title, and the IBF United States junior middleweight title, to name a few.

And that’s just in men’s boxing. Throw in the 17 weight classes and four major sanctioning bodies in women’s boxing, and the sport’s vast expanse provides for the possibility of something like 140 world champions. Once you add the secondary belts, you could be approaching close to 300 potential titleholders.

Of course, there are not actually that many champions. A lot of current titleholders own multiple belts at the same time, such as super middleweight king Canelo Alvarez (WBA, WBC, WBO world champion), Muslim middleweight star Janibek Alimkhanuly (IBF, WBO champ), and women’s boxing GOAT Claressa Shields (WBC, WBO, and IBF heavyweight; WBO light heavyweight; WBA and WBC middleweight champ simultaneously). There are also a lot of titles that are vacant for one reason or another.

Whatever the real number of champions may be, there’s another large, hard-to-pinpoint number of boxing fans and media who believe it’s too much. Too hard for the public to keep up. Too complicated for the mainstream media to cover. Too little TV time for all of the deserving champions to shine. Too easy for mediocre fighters to call themselves “champion” and dilute the importance of what that label means. And the hope is that Turki Alalshikh (who is also chairman of the Islamic Solidarity Sports Federation, which co-organizes the Islamic Solidarity Games), with his seemingly endless flow of Saudi money and an admirable desire to put together the fights that boxing fans want to see, can exert his power and essentially put the sanctioning bodies out of business by making them obsolete. The dream is for Alalshikh to un-clutter a sport that has become the embodiment of one of those tragic homes on Hoarders.

Those fans and media tend to pine for the “good old days” — the days before many of them were born — when boxing for the most part had only eight weight classes and one world champion per weight class. It was, undeniably, a simpler time. It was, arguably, a better time.

But that doesn’t exactly mean things are in bad shape today.

Submitted on behalf of Ummah Sport for the Unpopular Opinion files: Boxing does not have a too-many-champions problem.

For starters, anyone looking forward to a day when there are fewer divisions in boxing can give that up. Boxing will not go back to eight weight classes for the same reason that it won’t go back to 15-round title fights. It’s a health and safety issue. More weight classes makes it more likely that two fighters will enter the ring at close to the same exact weight, which is ideal. Fewer weight classes increases the chance of two fighters entering the ring with one having a significant weight advantage, which is not ideal. So we’re only going to go forward, not backwards, when it comes to the number of weight classes. (The bridgerweight division — designed to bridge the gap between cruiserweights and the really heavy heavyweights — was just introduced by the WBC in 2020 and adopted by the WBA in 2023.)

As for the sanctioning bodies, while someone like Alalshikh could ease some of the pressure of the chokehold they have over boxing, they’re never going away. Too many people with roots too deep in the fight game are making too much money for sanctioning bodies to disappear. And with each sanctioning body will come a number of championships, because that’s the leverage they have to get fighters and promoters to listen to them (and pay them). Fighters want championship belts, and promoters want to promote championship fights. There may come a day when the glut of secondary titles is thinned out a bit, but that’s likely the best-case scenario.

So if there are bound to always be a lot of champions and title belts, it brings back the question: Is that bad for boxing? I don’t really think it is.

Those who want a major consolidation of titles in boxing often cite MMA as the model to follow. Every combat sports fan knows Alex Pereira is the one and only UFC light heavyweight champion, and Islam Makhachev is the one and only UFC lightweight champ. But, here’s the thing: That’s the UFC. That’s not all of MMA. While the UFC is by far the biggest and most widely recognizable promotion in the sport of MMA, they are basically equivalent to one sanctioning body in boxing; they have their unique set of rules, they have their own ranking, they have their own championships. But they also have competition, technically. The Professional Fighters League (PFL) is another promotion that has their own champions at each weight class. So is ONE Championship, Rizin, Invicta, and Cage Warriors, to name a few. The same applies to kickboxing, Muay Thai, and other combat sports. Perhaps to the chagrin of Noah Lyles, there are many world champions.

In MMA, current heavyweight champions include Jon Jones (UFC), Tom Aspinall (UFC interim), Francis Ngannou (PFL Super Fights), Dennis Goltsov (PFL 2024 tournament), and Oumar Kane (ONE Championship). Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head, and I’d consider myself a casual MMA fan. That’s really no different than boxing’s list of heavyweight world champions: Oleksandr Usyk (WBC, WBA, WBO), Daniel Dubois (IBF), Joseph Parker (WBO interim), and Kubrat Pulev (WBC regular). Having a lot of title belts hasn’t exactly hurt MMA, so why should it hurt boxing?

From a pure personal-preference standpoint, I like watching a fight when there’s a championship on the line. Although I will honestly watch anyone go at it in kickboxing and Muay Thai, boxing isn’t on the list of sports that I will watch no matter who’s involved. But I am more likely to watch a fight between two boxers I don’t know if they’re competing for a title — even if the belt looks a little cheaper than a major world championship belt, or has a name like the IBF intercontinental junior welterweight title. And I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

Also, I don’t buy the argument that having a lot of champions is confusing for the public. When Mike Tyson ruled the roost in his heyday, even the most casual boxing fan knew that Iron Mike was The Man at heavyweight — even if the likes of Tim Witherspoon, James “Bonecrusher” Smith, Tony Tucker, Francesco Damiani, Michael Moorer, and Henry Akinwande also held heavyweight titles at times during Tyson’s reign. Nobody would stumble onto a Michael Moorer fight, see him with a title belt and forget Tyson’s standing in the sport.

The same thing applies today. Any fight fan who knows about Usyk knows he is the top dog in heavyweight boxing, and the existence of Dubois or Parker or Pulev with their title belts doesn’t change that perception. Now, whether casual sports fans actually know who Usyk is, that’s another discussion for another day — one that would get into the marketing of boxing and its elite competitors. But as far as who has the championship belts and how many there are, that is not what’s holding boxing back.