WBA Loses Recognition Amid Conflict Of Interest Controversy

In a noteworthy turn of events, the World Boxing Association (WBA) has lost its recognition as a world boxing sanctioning body by BoxRec.com, the largest and most respected independent record keeper in the sport.

The decision comes in the wake of the WBA’s attempt to form their own online record keeping organization, reviving the dormant Fight Fax name and url– a move that has been tied to Saudi Arabian efforts to achieve greater prominence in the sport, headed by Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority.

The sanctioning body’s announcement came during their ongoing WBA Asia Convention in Vietnam.

Per WBA Asia’s Facebook account (via auto translate):

“One of our important agenda would be fightfax.com presentation which provides online boxing record, boxing statistics plus more features. You would be very surprised! For the betterment and unbiased in boxing, we always try to do our best.”

Matthew Brown of Brunch Boxing has been all over the story, detailing how FightFax.com was brought back to life on April 24 of this year, on the same day the WBA announced its “partnership” with Alalshikh and the Saudis.

Brown also wrote of the reported attempt from Alalshikh in June to purchase Boxrec.com as “part of a broader effort to reorganize the sport.”

Given the way this has all played out, it certainly gives the impression that the Saudis, unable or unwilling to buyout BoxRec, have set out to replace them, using the WBA as the facilitators of the record keeping replacement.

Having the backing of the oldest sanctioning body in the sport could also add a degree of credibility to the move, at least, possibly, in the eyes of Alalshikh, who recently declared himself “The Face of Boxing” on his Twitter account.

Back on May 6, Alalshikh wondered aloud on social media about BoxRec’s pound-for-pound placement of Terence Crawford– a fighter sponsored by the Saudis’ Riyadh Season project and one whose career has become a personal pet project of the advisor to the Saudi Royal Court.

“[Naoya] Inoue is a great boxer, but Crawford is the pound-for-pound number one,” Alalshikh wrote via Twitter. “I don’t know how the ranking works or if there’s a clear criteria, but it seems like there are some personal opinions and inaccuracies involved. I believe that boxing needs one entity to evaluate with transparency and credibility. Soon, I will support a project for that matter…!”

If this WBA-backed effort is a Saudi-run initiative, the ethical issues are numerous– beginning and ending with the fact that a boxing company, with commercial interest in fighter rankings and recognition, seeks to be the arbiter of those rankings and recognitions.

It brings to mind The Ring Magazine Scandal in the 70’s where Don King, via paid manipulation of Ring Magazine, rigged the Ring’s rankings to benefit his United States Boxing Championships, a tournament King had sold to ABC Television.

In the present tense, this particular WBA/Saudi/FightFax situation would have further-reaching implications, given the Saudis’ recent purchased influence in the sport.

Saudi Arabia currently has “partnerships” with promoters Golden Boy, Top Rank, Matchroom, Queensberry, the streaming service DAZN, and the WBA and WBC. Through those “partnerships,” much of the boxing media would also be caught up in the net of conflict.

In a worst case scenario, these conflicts would lead to the boxing equivalent of a constitutional crisis, where a splintered and often conflicted sport would become even more splintered and conflicted. Not even “official” records would necessarily be taken as accurate anymore. Anything reported by the mainstream boxing media would have to be seen as questionable.

The current WBA Fight Fax’s ranking of Saul “Canelo” Alvarez — who had recent public beef with Turki Alalshikh– at no. 36 in the super middleweight division, teases the distinct possibility that certain rankings for certain fighters could be conveniently manipulated.

Even the best case scenario, however, is not that good as this whole thing could morph into some needless and pointless posturing that only casts a “wtf” cloud on boxing’s past, present, and future.

More to come…