To say there's a huge mess of randomly piled up world rankings and world title belts would be a great understatement. Not only are there tons and tons of randomly opposing but strangely similar sanctioning bodies, none of which ever agree on anything, and all pretend to have never heard of each other, except when they hop onto a big fight to make it also sanctioned by them.
Just take a look at their world rankings right now and compare them see? So totally different!! None of them have the same people in their top five, and they don't even have the top three from the other promotion anywhere in their top ten. Crazy!
There are also way more weight classes in mainstream use right now than most people realise: No less than 17 of them, each with an undisputed world champion (or two), ranging from 105 lbs strawweight and the 108 lbs junior flyweight (pretty much the same thing? Yeah, exactly!) to cruiserweight and heavyweight, either side of 200 lbs. In addition, there are also a dozen different event types, at which an aspiring boxer may currently try to fight his way up the rankings.
In addition to all that, there are also millions of weird and baffling mixtures of how high up the rungs of the rankings ladder the two fighters are. It sometimes seems like the matchmaker's job is to ensure that none of the fights are ever well-matched, evenly matched or sensibly paired up, as the undefeated fighters on a hot streak never go up against each other until it is title match time, and the champions often find ways of avoiding having to fight the true number one contender, you know, the ultra-hot prospect on a hot and dazzling winning streak, or the and instead they'll defend the title instead against the only fighter who has actually lost to three of the top ten already in recent years.
What gives? Do they take us for fools? Who could possibly be behind such a tragically badly organised set-up?
Well, you can look up who the managers and chairmen of the WBA, the WBC, the IBF, the WBO and the IBO are. They are a bunch of reasonably all-right guys if you meet them individually or in groups, but you will never get the big issues of the world sport solved by any of them alone. Each one of them is always trying to make money off all the big names and the hot venues, rather than to impartially offer a fair opportunity to each aspiring boxer and a fair recognition of every aspiring boxer's achievement. They're insider clubs, subject to lobbying and to being seduced by the big names on the big pay per views, even if other boxers would have earned that place on that pay-per-view with way more impressive achievements under their belt to earn that big spotlight place. It's a mean world, and certainly not a fair world.
What if all of these problems were to be solved, all at the same time? What if we were about to enter a world where everything has changed, for the better? Well, believe it or not, it has, just a few years ahead of the day when you are reading this. This is how we got there. And this is how things are now arranged:
Now let's take that big daring leap through the vortex. Let's land in a world where the countries of the world have decreed a forced merger between all the boxing organisations into one big fair new and improved impartial and money-generous governing body with one world title and one world rankings, with a whole bunch of clever new features that make it all work so much better. This is the world you are about to enter.