A professional boxer’s career is only meant to last so long. We know this. We expect the pound-for-pound list and the superstar strata of the sport to turn over every five or 10 years.

But it’s different for those non-pugilistic participants in and around the ring. Trainers, managers, referees, judges, journalists – those are careers that can easily stretch 30, 40, 50 years.

Even so, all things must end eventually. All old guards must give way to new guards. And on two particular fronts right now in American boxing, the old guard is flirting with ending its shift.

Actually, one of those fronts has already clocked out, which is playing no small role in the other hobbling toward the exits.

Remember boxing on TV? Like, actual networks that could be found on your cable guide airing fights?

For decades, HBO, Showtime and ESPN kept the sport’s blood pumping steadily into living rooms nationwide, but one by one, the executives running those networks – or the honchos at the parent companies of those networks making commandments from the comfort of their yachts – lost interest in boxing.

New corporate overlords laid HBO boxing to rest in October 2018. A similar crew of country club VIPs who live their lives one stock quote at a time axed Showtime boxing at the end of 2023. And finally the suits at ESPN (or the Disney suits those suits report to) caught wind of the trend and got out of the boxing business last July.

(Note: The author contributed in the past as a freelance boxing writer/podcaster for HBO, Showtime and ESPN’s online platforms.)

For most of this century, it’s been widely predicted that MMA would kill boxing. In the end, it wasn’t MMA that killed televised boxing. It was M&A.

(Although, yes, MMA may have executed a takedown before those mergers and acquisitions forced the submission.)

There’s still plenty of boxing to watch on streaming networks, free and otherwise, from ProBox TV to DAZN to, beginning this week, Paramount+. (Note: BoxingScene and ProBox TV are both owned by Garry Jonas)

But boxing has been stripped of its linear title.

And as a result, the U.S.-based promoters we all grew up with are in the process of becoming the next casualty.

Some of them fell to the fringes several years ago – it’s been a little while since anyone thought of either Don King Productions or Main Events as a promotional powerhouse.

But now the rest appear to be crumbling. The holy trinity of American boxing promoters over the last decade-plus have been Top Rank (where the “plus” in “decade-plus” is doing a lot of work), Golden Boy and PBC.

As 2026 dawns, there is legit reason for concern about whether any of those three companies will last the year.

A shift took place around the turn of the century that saw networks acting more like promoters, and promoters acting more like managers, and somewhere along the line, promoters became more reliant on networks to fund their businesses. 

As it stands now, none of those three major American promoters has a network partner – unless you count a streamer that primarily works with you on pay-per-views in which it assumes no financial risk.

Top Rank had ESPN. It doesn’t anymore.

PBC had Showtime. It doesn’t anymore.

Golden Boy had HBO, and then DAZN. It definitely doesn't have HBO anymore and it might not have DAZN anymore, pending ongoing and not especially encouraging negotiations.

By the way, I take no pleasure in discussing the potential demise of any of these companies. I know and admire people employed by all three and hope not to see any of them hunting for jobs. But the facts are the facts.

Top Rank still has a loaded stable of fighters (fully or as a co-promoter), including Naoya Inoue, Tyson Fury, Teofimo Lopez, Mikaela Mayer, O’Shaquie Foster, Rafael Espinoza, Keyshawn Davis, Emanuel Navarrete, Abdullah Mason, Xander Zayas, Raymond Muratalla, Richard Torrez Jnr, Bruce “Shu Shu” Carrington, Christian Mbilli, and on and on and on.

But where are you going to watch them ply their trade if you can’t make it to the arena?

We are approaching six full months since a network kicked in for a Top Rank card. Free Facebook streams and Fubo are fine for fans. But they are very much not a long-term solution. Zayas faces Abass Baraou at Coliseo de Puerto Rico Jose Miguel Agrelot in San Juan in less than two weeks, and the Top Rank website still lists the broadcaster as “To Be Announced.”

As for PBC, the company website lists such championship-level fighters as Mario Barrios, Isaac “Pitbull” Cruz, Sebastian Fundora, Erislandy Lara, Frank “The Ghost” Martin, and assorted Gary Russells – along with countless retired and/or defected former PBC fighters.

While that page assuredly needs some updating, the schedule page on the Premier Boxing Champions website appears up to date – and couldn't possibly be more depressing. There are no fights listed, just the words “new fight schedule coming soon.”

Just a couple of months after Showtime’s boxing program got kiboshed, PBC announced with much fanfare and excitement its replacement arrangement with Amazon Prime. But in 2024 and 2025 combined, there were just 12 Prime cards (one every two months, on average), and eight of them were on pay-per-view (meaning a Prime subscription got you one boxing card every six months).

This has not been the audacious and productive leap into the streaming future that anyone in the sport hoped for. Jeff Bezos has about as much money as 2,500 Al Haymons, but apparently he isn’t interested in earmarking even a rounding error’s worth of that fortune for boxing.

Then there’s Golden Boy. The roster is not as strong as it once was, but still includes Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez, Oscar Collazo, Gabriela Fundora, Floyd Schofield, William Zepeda and, under varying degrees of duress, Ryan Garcia and Vergil Ortiz Jnr.

But once Raul Curiel defeated late sub Jordan Panthen last Friday night in Palm Desert, California, there wasn’t a single fight left on the GBP schedule. Garcia faces Barrios next month, but that pay-per-view event is being promoted by Riyadh Season, not Golden Boy. Golden Boy’s contract with DAZN expired at the end of 2025, and the Curiel card was reported by boxing writer Dan Rafael to be a one-off.

Oscar De La Hoya has said he is in the process of negotiating a two-year extension with DAZN. In the meantime, the boxing fan base is growing exasperated by what seems to be Oscar standing in the way of Ortiz vs. Jaron “Boots” Ennis getting finalized, and Ortiz has grown exasperated enough to file a lawsuit against Golden Boy. And DAZN is reported to be counting on Ortiz vs. Ennis getting done to make continuing to work with Golden Boy worthwhile.

So it may be as black and white as Golden Boy makes the deal for this fight – even if it’s not the best deal De La Hoya and his frustrated fighter can possibly get – or Golden Boy has nobody to televise its fights, and before long there is no Golden Boy.

Of course, for an old guard to fall, there typically has to be a new guard to topple it, and there’s no question who the two powerhouses doing the pushing are.

Turki Alalshikh’s Saudi General Entertainment Authority-backed Riyadh Season/Ring conglomerate (I never know quite what to call this promotional enterprise of a thousand names) has been throwing its money and influence around for a few years. And Dana White’s Zuffa Boxing is about to begin doing the same.

Alalshikh executed a game plan we’ve seen plenty of times before, most recently with PBC: Overpay for fights to make a splash, benefiting the boxers in the short term and shaking up the pay scale in an unsustainable way. It’s typically good for the sport and the fans – until it isn’t.

In this case, the longer-range plan may actually be quite diabolical, as exemplified by the potential obstructions to Ortiz-Ennis. Golden Boy and Matchroom Boxing are looking to guarantee the junior middleweights X dollars to fight each other. But Alalshikh once had them believing the pot was about 2X dollars. That’s the kind of simple math that just might make a fighter want to leave his promoter.

Meanwhile, Zuffa signing cruiserweight champion Jai Opetaia last week may be a bigger development than it seems at first glance. The Dana White stable, all club fighters, prospects and fringe contenders out of the gate, now has itself a boxer who matters on the world stage.

Zuffa Boxing started with the streaming deal with Paramount+ before it had a stable. But if it’s going to have a stable too, well, not that anyone wasn’t taking White’s entry into boxing seriously, but his ascent becomes inevitable if he has top-flight fighters on call.

Callum Walsh vs. Carlos Ocampo this Friday in the promotion’s debut on Paramount+ is a fine fight, but on its own, it’s more whisper than scream. White probably recognizes, though, that he doesn't need to scream just yet. Not if the old guard of promoters is about to go silent on its own. Championship-level fighters looking for an American promoter are about to become as common as cauliflower ears in UFC locker rooms.

These developments all intersect and overlap. The old guard loses its TV access and the money that comes with it while a new guard comes in waving silly amounts of money around, and before you know it, the old guard is gone.

No HBO, no Showtime, no ESPN. Soon perhaps no Top Rank, no Golden Boy, no PBC.

Blink at the wrong time, and the world you once knew becomes unrecognizable.

Of course, nothing lasts forever, and change is inevitable – fill in the “sands of time” cliche of your choosing.

But it’s alarming to consider the rapid and extreme nature of the overhaul – and to ponder how much it’s owed to a handful of mergers, acquisitions and new bosses who could see no point in broadcasting boxing if it wasn’t going to boost their year-end bonuses.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.