It’s hard to shake up the top of the charts right now in the pound-for-pound race with so few appearances by the best in the game.
2022 was a year that got off to a fantastic start with a blistering schedule in the first half of the year and a seeming slow down in the second half. There was more than enough of the good stuff to make the year far more plus than minus but what stands out in this year-end list is none of the top ten fought more than twice and four got to scratch only once.
Throw in that only one is younger than thirty and it says a lot about the need for a little more youth and activity in boxing’s immediate future.
The top two, Naoya Inoye and Oleksandr Usyk, remain unchanged from the summer with voters narrowly changing spots three and four between Errol Spence and Terence Crawford. The order there will hopefully be settled in the ring in 2023. Dmitry Bivol moved ahead of Saul Alvarez with his second win of 2022 while two new names, Devin Haney and Juan Francisco Estrada, narrowly bump Stephen Fulton and Shakur Stevenson out of the top ten.
Fulton and Stevenson were the only other fighters receiving votes for the top ten this time around.
The full update can be found at: https://www.boxingscene.com/rankings/pound-for-pound
Contributing Staff: Manouk Akopyan, Jake Donovan, Lyle Fitzsimmons, Keith Idec, Cliff Rold
As always, feel free to agree…and disagree. This list is for entertainment purposes only and based purely on imagination, hypotheticals, and conjecture just like every other pound for pound list ever written. Neither it nor any other such list made up of such illusory ingredients should be used to forward corporate agendas of any kind.
That doesn’t make it any less fun to argue about.
Last Update: June 15, 2022
Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, a member of the International Boxing Research Organization, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com
