Ellie Scotney is 27 years old, she holds two junior featherweight belts and hopes to win another on Friday night when, on the Katie Taylor-Amanda Serrano III bill, she battles Yamileth Mercado inside New York’s Madison Square Garden.
After several years on Matchroom undercards, a stage of Scotney’s career that saw her both win world titles and struggle for prominence, this year she made the switch to Jake Paul’s MVP, a promotional group intent on taking women’s boxing, and Scotney, to the next level.
“Contracts, whether working for Sainsburys or whatever, can feel like a prison sentence but the first thing I thought when looking at this [MVP] contract was, ‘Wow, I’m safe for that long’,” Scotney explains. “As a fighter, if you can get that feeling [of safety], it’s what we long for and we need. They’ve got a vision, and not just to put me on undercards, but to headline me. It’s so much bigger, it’s like night and day to what I’ve seen before. It’s everything you’d want as a fighter.”
Scotney didn’t divulge the length of the contract but was happy to reveal that she’s been guaranteed three fights a year, a number she hasn’t achieved since an up-and-comer in 2022, and she fully expects it to be “my last boxing contract”.
Activity is key for any fighter, not least the 10-0 Scotney, who adores the sport, devours fight footage – “all I watch is boxing and Eastenders” – and trains like a trojan.
The reason for that desire to fight regularly, and earn regularly, is simple: She knows her time in the sport will be short, and thus, the notion of packing away the gloves and somehow living a normal life, is already troubling.
The Shane McGuigan-trained Scotney has recently seen her best friend in boxing, Robbie Davies Jnr, face up to the reality of retirement.
“It scares every fighter, life after boxing, it really does,” Scotney admits. “Even now, just talking to you about it, ugh, my stomach is going funny.
“As boxers we live in our own little worlds and our world is only this big and the outside world is that big, but, to us, the boxing world is the biggest it can ever be. We can’t really look outside because, when you take one eye off, you feel like your feet have fell off. We’re so driven, so you have to be obsessed, you have to be all in, because it’s a sport that can’t take any less.”
This weekend’s headliners, Taylor, 39, and Serrano, 36, are approaching the end of the line. Whoever loses will be nudged towards retirement and even the winner will be asked when the time will come. Scotney admits to thinking about that moment in her own career more readily than she’s willing to discuss it.
“They always say a boxer is the last person to know [when to retire] and I think that’s true from the people I’ve seen around me,” she explains. “We all want to be able to say we walked out at the right time, but I don’t think anyone truly does. “There’s always a carrot being dangled, there’s always one more fight. And it’s like everything in life, you get through it [a fight], and then the future is on the other side.
“But I sit here now, at 27, and I think that in four to six years, if I can do what I believe I can, I feel like I’d be…” She doesn’t allow the word retirement past her lips. “I’m saying this now but next time we speak I’ll be 42 years old, and I’ll still be fighting [laughs]. But I don’t think my nose has got that long left in it.”
Scotney’s self-effacing nature is well known to those who talk to her regularly. One wonders whether it’s a nod to being brought up in a family of seven, begging to follow her older brother to the boxing gym – because “he always came back with a carton of ribena and a Mars bar as a reward” – and then battling for acceptance once there.
“There’s certainly progress on that side,” she says when asked about young girls who walk into a gym today. “Some of the girls coming through are crazy [talented]. And more and more, people are not saying good young female fighters, it’s just good young fighters.”
It’s fashionable to say that women’s boxing is on the rise, that it’s broken the inherent sexism that shaped the industry for decades, but Scotney agrees the level of exposure – Taylor and Serrano aside – has unquestionably slipped in the last two years. Whether that’s down to the all-conquering influence from Saudi Arabia (Turki Alalshikh has thus far staged a solitary female championship fight), Scotney isn’t sure, but claiming world belts did not bring about the change to her life she presumed it would.
“I’d disappear for six or seven months [after my fight], it was like a flash in the pan,” Scotney explains. “I never had what should come with being a world champion. I was never pushed like a world champion. I never had the financial side of it.”
That is now all in the past. Scotney can forget about finding another line of work, as she was considering earlier this year, and again dedicate herself purely to boxing, the love of her life. “You find your meaning and your purpose in all ways of life but in boxing, it strips you back to what you are at the core,” she says. “You find yourself, and you can lose yourself, in boxing. It reveals who you really are. You never complete it, there is always more, you can always get better. I couldn’t imagine life without it. It genuinely scares me.”
As with any vocation in which one immerses themselves, the imperfections become clear: Scotney thinks the rise in drug-taking in boxing is “disgusting” and, when asked what she’d change if she controlled the sport, “addressing sanctioning fees would be high on my list, for certain. Those percentages add up, I’m telling you.”
For now, though, Scotney – a realist – is living the dream: Training for upcoming fights by day, watching old fight footage at night. Her favorite fighter, in a nod to her hardcore roots, is Orlando Canizales and she found great joy in striking up communication with the former bantamweight king on social media recently. “It was the real Orlando Canizales, by the way,” she chuckles proudly.
