Ring Magazine is Sold To Saudi Arabia: Why This Happened and Why It Matters

Today it became official– Saudi Arabia owns Ring Magazine.

Although common knowledge in boxing media circles for awhile, the news became official Wednesday afternoon when Turki Alalshikh, the Chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, tweeted a self-celebratory one-liner:

Today marks a new era for the Ring Magazine. Stay tuned! 🥊 pic.twitter.com/hhLHLFZM6I

— TURKI ALALSHIKH (@Turki_alalshikh) November 6, 2024

That “new era,” as it turns out, looks to be populated and managed by many of the same “old era” flubs, dweebs, hacks, and sycophants who messed boxing media up so badly that it required a “new era” in the first place.

Per Matthew Brown of Brunch Boxing, Boxingscene.com founder Rick Reeno will take the helm of the online Ring Magazine product while current Ring Magazine editor-in-chief Dougie Fischer will be in charge of the re-born print edition, which has been out of regular circulation since 2022, thanks, at least in part, to Fischer’s poor vision for the magazine and some dubious staffing decisions.

But if anyone knows how to cultivate and maintain a free, strong press, it’s the Saudis!

Owned by Oscar De La Hoya since 2007– and failing almost from the beginning– Ring Magazine has stagnated in a pool of conflict of interest, fully funded by a boxing promoter while trying to maintain a viable news division, as well as serving as a self-appointed de facto sanctioning body that issues both rankings and “world” titles.

The switch in ownership from De La Hoya to Turki Alalshikh/Saudi Arabia pulls Ring Magazine from that pool of conflict and places them squarely inside a raging sea of problematic collusion. Alalshikh has leveraged himself into a position of supreme power in the sport, with firm control of a still-growing boxing endeavor that oversees promotion, matchmaking, management, event hosting, broadcasting, sanctioning, and now media– with every tentacle of that multi-armed beast referring back to him and executed according to his whims, even if technically managed by intermediaries.

In real world circles, that would be considered a massive conflict of interest and it would see all parties involved guilt of collusion.

Per this writer’s article on the Queensberry Promotions-DAZN deal, via possible Alalshikh influence:

“Promotional companies responsible for the operation of boxing business are tied to a broadcast entity, which is being sponsored, at least in part, by a deep-pocketed third party, which is also sponsoring the same promotional companies.

Now, throw in the fact that the same entity “sponsoring” all of the above is also “sponsoring” two of the sanctioning bodies responsible for issuing recognized world championships and championship rankings, as well as major media sources responsible for reporting on the sport– possibly including one which issues its own rankings and self-described “real” world titles.

That’s a whole mess of conflict.”

But this is boxing.

From Alalshikh’s side, the strategy is clear when it comes to the acquisition of Ring Magazine.

With this one move, he not only acquires a major boxing media outlet, but also rankings around which he can create his own self-contained miniverse and, even, the long-rumored Saudi boxing league– something which brings to mind the infamous Ring Magazine scandal of the 70s where promoter Don King bribed Ring Magazine staff to manipulate their rankings for use in his “United States Boxing Championships” tournament.

For Alalshikh, purchasing an established entity that could cover both media and rankings is significantly easier than building from scratch, hence his abandoning of the much talked-about Saudi-funded major media website and the similarly abandoned Saudi-funded resurrection of Fight Fax record keeping to replace BoxRec.com.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious where all of this is headed and it won’t be to a good place for Western fight fans or for the sport in general as control and accountability slip outside of the West’s jurisdiction and into the hands of a murderous monarchy.

For Ring Magazine, the sale to the Saudis probably marks the official end of their run as a viable news outfit, although it could be argued that the end in that regard came a long while ago.

Founded in 1922, the magazine served as the closest boxing had to a historical journalism archive. However, in recent years, it has buried itself with conflicts of interest that range from De La Hoya ownership to rumored undisclosed DAZN funding to, now, status as a Saudi-owned property.

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