Boxing at Wembley Stadium: Every Fight and Record Crowd
Every boxing bill at Wembley Stadium in London from 1924 to the rebuilt ground, with results, announced crowds and how the UK attendance record kept moving.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished British Boxing24 min read
- First stadium bill
- 9 August 1924
- First fight at rebuilt stadium
- 31 May 2014
- Highest announced crowd
- 96,000 (2024)
- Football capacity
- 90,000
The ring sits on a platform where the centre circle would be, and the nearest seats are close enough to hear a corner shouting instructions. The farthest are in the top tier behind one goal, roughly the length of a football pitch away, and the people in them watch most of the fight on a screen the size of a house. That is boxing at Wembley Stadium, and for one night every year or two it is the largest live audience British boxing gets.
The short answer to what has happened there: the old Wembley's four well-documented stadium main events came in 1924, 1963, 1986 and 1995, and the rebuilt stadium has staged six major bills since 2014, every one of them carrying a world title. The announced crowd record for boxing at Wembley is 96,000, set when Daniel Dubois knocked out Anthony Joshua on 21 September 2024. The figure rose three times in ten years, from 80,000 for Carl Froch against George Groves in 2014 to that figure, and it is the highest announced crowd for a boxing bill in UK history. The list below was checked on 7 October 2026.
Every boxing bill at Wembley Stadium, old ground and new
Stadium boxing is rare, and Wembley's list is short enough to set out in full. It covers main events at the stadium itself, not the indoor arena next door, which has staged hundreds of shows and gets its own section further down.
| Date | Main event | Title at stake | Result | Announced crowd |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9 Aug 1924 | Tommy Gibbons v Jack Bloomfield | None | Gibbons KO 3 | Not reliably recorded |
| 18 Jun 1963 | Henry Cooper v Cassius Clay | None | Clay TKO 5 | About 35,000 |
| 19 Jul 1986 | Tim Witherspoon v Frank Bruno | WBA heavyweight | Witherspoon TKO 11 | Reports vary |
| 2 Sep 1995 | Oliver McCall v Frank Bruno | WBC heavyweight | Bruno points (UD) | Reports vary |
| 31 May 2014 | Carl Froch v George Groves II | IBF and WBA super-middleweight | Froch KO 8 | 80,000 |
| 29 Apr 2017 | Anthony Joshua v Wladimir Klitschko | IBF, WBA and IBO heavyweight | Joshua TKO 11 | 90,000 |
| 22 Sep 2018 | Anthony Joshua v Alexander Povetkin | IBF, WBA, WBO and IBO heavyweight | Joshua TKO 7 | About 80,000 |
| 23 Apr 2022 | Tyson Fury v Dillian Whyte | WBC heavyweight | Fury TKO 6 | 94,000 |
| 21 Sep 2024 | Daniel Dubois v Anthony Joshua | IBF heavyweight | Dubois KO 5 | 96,000 |
| 19 Jul 2025 | Oleksandr Usyk v Daniel Dubois II | Undisputed heavyweight | Usyk KO 5 | About 90,000 |
Two cautions about that last column. Old-stadium figures come from newspaper reports rather than ticketing systems, and accounts of the 1924, 1986 and 1995 crowds disagree with one another, so no single figure is given for them; the 1963 figure is the one most often cited and is an approximation too. The modern figures are what the promoter announced on the night. They are not audited counts, though with an all-ticketed, all-seated stadium they are unlikely to be far out.
The gap between 1995 and 2014 is the demolition and rebuild. The old stadium closed in 2000 and the new one opened in 2007, and it was seven more years before anyone put a ring in it. Why that wait was so long is part of the Froch v Groves story.
What the list does not include: amateur tournaments, exhibition bouts and the occasional charity event. Nor does it include any fight announced but not yet held. A heavyweight bill has been talked about for Wembley in most years since 2017, and a page that listed talk as fact would be out of date within a month. This one lists what happened.
What the list tells you before you read anything else
Eight of the ten main events were between two heavyweights, and a ninth had a heavyweight in it. One was super-middleweight, which is the exception that proves how unusual Froch and Groves were. And every one of the six modern bills had a Briton in the main event and was staged between late April and late September. Those three facts explain most of what follows on this page.
How the Wembley attendance record kept moving
For seventy-five years the number every British boxing crowd was measured against came from somewhere else. On 10 July 1939, at White City in west London, Len Harvey beat Jock McAvoy on points over fifteen rounds, with the British light-heavyweight title and the Board of Control's version of the world title at stake, in front of a crowd that accounts put anywhere from about 80,000 to 90,000. Nobody counted it precisely, which is part of why the figure lasted. It sat in the record books as the British high-water mark through the whole of the post-war era.
Wembley caught it in stages.
2014: the first sell-out at the new ground
Froch v Groves II was announced at 80,000 and sold out. That was reported as the biggest post-war boxing crowd in Britain, and it was the first time the rebuilt stadium's operators had laid out the pitch for a ring.
2017: Joshua and Klitschko reach 90,000
Three years later the promoter applied for a higher capacity and got it. The 90,000 announced for Joshua against Klitschko was described at the time as a post-war record, and it reached the top of the range quoted for White City. The bill had sold out in the general sale and more seats were released once the licence allowed it.
2022 and 2024: past the White City figure
Fury against Whyte was announced at 94,000, beyond any figure quoted for White City. Dubois against Joshua added 2,000 more. Each step came from the same source, which was more seats on the pitch, rather than any change to the stands.
Promoters' announced figures for each main event at the rebuilt stadium. Not audited counts. The 1939 White City crowd, put at 80,000 to 90,000, is the older British benchmark.
Show the numbers
| Item | Announced crowd |
|---|---|
| Froch v Groves 2014 | 80000spectators |
| Joshua v Klitschko 2017 | 90000spectators |
| Joshua v Povetkin 2018 | 80000spectators |
| Fury v Whyte 2022 | 94000spectators |
| Dubois v Joshua 2024 | 96000spectators |
| Usyk v Dubois 2025 | 90000spectators |
The record is a moving number, and a reader landing here in a later year should expect it to have changed. Wembley's maximum for boxing is set by its safety certificate rather than by the building, and a future bill with a bigger pitch layout could move it again. The pattern also shows that the record is not a straight climb. The Povetkin bill and the 2025 Usyk rematch both came in below the peak, because the pitch layout, the size of the press area and the broadcast positions are agreed afresh for each event.
How a football ground holds more people for boxing than for a cup final
Wembley's capacity for an FA Cup final or an England international is 90,000. For Dubois v Joshua it was 96,000. The difference is the pitch.
At a football match the playing surface is empty except for twenty-two players, the officials and the advertising boards. For boxing the ring goes in the middle, on a raised platform roughly where the centre circle is painted, and the rest of the pitch is covered with a temporary floor that carries rows of seats. Those floor seats are the most expensive tickets in the house, and there are thousands of them. Once you add them to the bowl, the total passes the football figure even though some seats in the lower tier are taken out for camera platforms, the press area and the walkway the boxers use.
The licence, not the building, sets the number
The number of people a stadium in England may hold is fixed by a general safety certificate issued by the local authority under the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975. For Wembley that is the London Borough of Brent, advised by the Sports Grounds Safety Authority, whose guidance (the Green Guide) sets out how capacity is calculated from exits, gangways and the time it takes to clear each part of the ground. A pitch full of temporary seating changes those calculations, so a promoter wanting a higher figure for boxing has to apply for it. The safety officers then check the layout: where the gangways run across the pitch, how the floor seats are evacuated, where the stewards stand.
The promoter does not simply decide to sell more tickets. Each step up in the Wembley record followed an application and an approved layout. That is why the crowds rose in thousands rather than tens of thousands, and why the figure for one bill can be lower than the one before it.
Why the roof matters less than people think
Wembley's roof is partly retractable but does not close over the pitch. A ring under open sky in July is fine; the same ring in a February downpour is not. The roof shelters most of the seats in the bowl, not the floor seats around the ring, and that single fact does as much as anything to decide when a stadium bill can be held.
For the general layout of the rebuilt ground, the transport and the stands, our guide to Wembley Stadium as a building covers the parts that do not change from event to event.
The 1924 Empire Stadium bill: Gibbons, Bloomfield and the empty spaces
Wembley's boxing history starts with a flop, and it is more instructive than any of the triumphs.
In 1924 the stadium was barely a year old and was still called the Empire Stadium, built as the centrepiece of the British Empire Exhibition. Major Arnold Wilson, a promoter from Preston, saw a chance to stage a big fight in a big ground. He matched Tommy Gibbons, an American heavyweight who had taken Jack Dempsey the full fifteen rounds at Shelby, Montana, in 1923, against Jack Bloomfield, the British light-heavyweight champion who had moved up in weight. The date was 9 August 1924.
Gibbons knocked Bloomfield out in the third round of a scheduled twenty, and Bloomfield never boxed again. The fight was over quickly and was not a contest of equals. What people remembered was the money. Accounts of the turnout differ too widely to quote a figure, but they agree it was far short of what a bowl that size needed, and the seats in the stands were a long way from a small square of canvas. Gibbons's purse demands were heavy, and the promotion is recorded as having bankrupted Wilson. The exact loss is not reliably recorded and is not given here.
What promoters took from it
Three lessons, and they are still the lessons.
The first was that a fight in a stadium needs an opponent the public believes in. Bloomfield was a good British fighter, but few people paying to sit a hundred yards from the ring believed he would beat Gibbons, and they were right.
The second was that distance kills atmosphere unless something fills the gap. In 1924 there was nothing: no screens, no amplified ring announcer, no lighting rig. A modern crowd sees every punch in close-up on the big screens. The 1924 crowd saw two small figures and heard very little.
The third was about the ground's natural rhythm. The Empire Stadium was built for football, for the exhibition's pageants and, from 1927, for greyhound racing, which gave it a steady income without the risk a boxing promotion carried. The next stadium bill that boxing history remembers came thirty-nine years later.
Henry Cooper v Cassius Clay, June 1963: the left hook and the glove
The second Wembley bill is the one everybody knows, and the story told about it has grown in the retelling.
On 18 June 1963 Henry Cooper, the British and Commonwealth heavyweight champion, fought the 21-year-old Cassius Clay, the Olympic light-heavyweight champion from Rome in 1960, who had predicted he would win in five rounds. The crowd was about 35,000. Clay was already a name, but not yet world champion; he took the title from Sonny Liston the following February.
Clay controlled the early rounds and opened a cut over Cooper's left eye, which was Cooper's known weakness throughout his career. Then, in the closing seconds of the fourth round, Cooper caught him with a left hook, the punch the British press had long since nicknamed "'Enry's 'Ammer". Clay went down against the ropes and got up, dazed, as the bell rang to end the round.
The split glove and how long it really delayed the fifth
What happened in Clay's corner is the most argued-over minute in British boxing. His trainer, Angelo Dundee, drew attention to a split along the seam of Clay's right glove, and the start of the fifth round was delayed while the glove was dealt with. The popular version says the delay bought Clay several minutes to recover. Later analysis of the film suggests the extra time was a matter of seconds, and accounts disagree on whether a replacement glove was ever fitted. The episode is the reason spare gloves are now expected at ringside. What can be said with confidence is that Clay came out for the fifth clear-headed, and that the delay did him no harm.
In the fifth, Clay went for the cut. Within the round it had become a gash, blood was running down Cooper's face, and the referee, Tommy Little, stopped the fight. Clay won on a technical knockout in round five, as he had said he would.
The two met again on 21 May 1966, by which time Clay was Muhammad Ali and world champion, at Arsenal's ground in Highbury. That fight also ended on a cut in Ali's favour, in the sixth round. People who remember the Wembley fight sometimes place the rematch there too. It was not.
The left hook made Cooper a national figure in a way that his titles alone never did, and it is one of the few moments from old Wembley that most British readers can picture without having seen it. Our full account of Cooper against Clay and the 1966 rematch goes through both fights round by round.
Frank Bruno's two Wembley world title nights
Frank Bruno fought for a world title at the old Wembley Stadium twice, nine years apart. He lost the first and won the second.
19 July 1986: stopped by Tim Witherspoon
Bruno was 24, unbeaten bar one defeat by James "Bonecrusher" Smith, and challenging Tim Witherspoon for the WBA heavyweight title. Promoters, encouraged by his popularity on television, put the fight into the stadium for the first time since Cooper and Clay, in front of a large summer crowd. Bruno started strongly and was ahead on the cards for much of the fight, but Witherspoon was the more experienced man by a distance and wore him down. In the eleventh round a right hand dropped Bruno and his corner was overrun as Witherspoon followed up; the referee stopped it. Technical knockout, round eleven.
The defeat did not hurt his standing with the public. If anything it made him more popular, because he had stood up to a better fighter for ten rounds in front of a home crowd, and the size of the gate told promoters that a British heavyweight with a world title chance could fill a stadium again. Promoters came back to the same ground with the same fighter nine years later.
2 September 1995: the points win over Oliver McCall
Nine years and two more failed world title attempts later (against Mike Tyson in Las Vegas in 1989 and Lennox Lewis at Cardiff Arms Park in 1993), Bruno came back to Wembley to challenge Oliver McCall for the WBC title. McCall had taken it from Lewis with a second-round knockout at Wembley Arena the previous September.
Bruno boxed the fight of his career for the first half, built a clear lead on the cards with his jab and right hand, then held on through a final round in which McCall came forward and Bruno spent much of the three minutes clinching. All three judges gave it to Bruno. Unanimous decision. He was WBC heavyweight champion at the fourth attempt.
Reports of the crowd vary, and by then the old stadium had become all-seated, which changed what it could hold for any event. The reign lasted until March 1996, when Bruno lost the title to Tyson in Las Vegas.
- July 1986, Wembley StadiumStopped in the eleventh round by Tim Witherspoon for the WBA title.
- February 1989, Las VegasStopped in the fifth round by Mike Tyson for the undisputed title.
- October 1993, Cardiff Arms ParkStopped in the seventh round by Lennox Lewis for the WBC title.
- September 1995, Wembley StadiumBeat Oliver McCall on points to become WBC champion.
Results of each fight. Two were at Wembley Stadium, one in Cardiff and one in Las Vegas.
For where Bruno's reign sits among the other British heavyweights, see our list of every British world heavyweight champion.
Froch v Groves II, May 2014: the night the rebuilt Wembley became a fight venue
The new stadium opened in 2007 and nobody boxed in it for seven years. Promoters looked at the numbers and saw the 1924 problem in modern form. Filling 80,000 seats needs a fight the general public wants, not only boxing fans, and in those years British boxing did not have a match that the stadium's operators, a football association with a fixture list to protect, could be confident would sell.
Carl Froch against George Groves changed that. Their first fight, in Manchester in November 2013, had ended with the referee stopping it in the ninth round while Groves was ahead on the cards and still on his feet. The stoppage was widely criticised, Groves was furious, and the rematch sold itself on grievance. Froch, the IBF and WBA super-middleweight champion, was a Nottingham fighter with a national following; Groves came from west London and could sell tickets in the capital.
The fight
Thirty-one May 2014. Eighty thousand sold, the first sell-out boxing crowd at the new Wembley. The fight was cagey, with Groves boxing well on the back foot and Froch pressing. In the eighth round Froch feinted, measured and threw a right hand that landed flush on Groves's jaw. Groves fell with his leg bent under him and the referee did not bother to count. Knockout, round eight.
It mattered beyond the result. The bill proved that a British fight between two British boxers, neither a heavyweight, could fill the national stadium. Every subsequent stadium promotion in Britain was built on that proof. The stadium operators had a template for laying out the pitch, the safety officers had a precedent to work from and broadcasters had a figure to sell pay-per-view against.
Our page on the Froch v Groves rivalry has both fights in detail, including the stoppage in Manchester that made the rematch possible.
The heavyweight nights that followed, from Klitschko to Usyk
Every Wembley bill since 2014 has been a heavyweight world title fight, and every one has ended inside the distance.
Joshua v Klitschko, 29 April 2017
Anthony Joshua held the IBF title and was 27; Wladimir Klitschko was 41 and coming back after losing his belts to Tyson Fury in 2015. The WBA and IBO titles were also on the line. Joshua dropped Klitschko in the fifth round, was himself dropped in the sixth, and looked spent. He recovered, and in the eleventh put Klitschko down twice with an uppercut and a left hook before the referee stopped it. It is still the best heavyweight fight staged in Britain in the modern era, and the 90,000 who saw it set what was then the post-war record.
Joshua v Povetkin, 22 September 2018
A mandatory defence against the Russian Alexander Povetkin, with Joshua's IBF, WBA, WBO and IBO titles at stake. Povetkin hurt Joshua early and bloodied his nose, but Joshua stopped him in the seventh round. About 80,000 attended.
Fury v Whyte, 23 April 2022
Tyson Fury defended his WBC title against Dillian Whyte, a Brixton heavyweight who had waited years for his chance. Fury controlled it from range and ended it in the sixth round with an uppercut; Whyte rose but was in no state to continue. The 94,000 announced passed the White City figure.
Dubois v Joshua, 21 September 2024
Daniel Dubois had been elevated to IBF champion and Joshua was the challenger. Dubois knocked him down in the first round, again later and finally in the fifth, when a right hand counter ended the fight. The crowd of 96,000 is the current Wembley record for boxing, as of the date this page was checked.
Usyk v Dubois II, 19 July 2025
Oleksandr Usyk, holding the WBA, WBC and WBO belts, met Dubois, the IBF holder, for the undisputed title in a rematch of their 2023 fight in Poland. Usyk dropped Dubois in the fifth round and finished him in the same round. It was the first fight for all four major heavyweight belts staged in Britain, and the first undisputed heavyweight bout of any era held in the UK since Tommy Burns fought Jem Roche in 1908. If you want the difference between holding several belts and holding all of them, our guide to what undisputed and unified mean sets it out.
The stoppage rate is worth a sentence. Big men in a big ground are what sells, and big men who land tend to finish fights early. The last Wembley Stadium main event to go the distance was Bruno against McCall in 1995, and the promoters are not complaining.
What a fight night at Wembley is actually like from the stands
Start with the time on your ticket. Gates open in the late afternoon, and a modern Wembley bill runs a long undercard of eight or more bouts. The main event usually starts late in the evening, often well after ten, because it is timed for television audiences in Britain and sometimes elsewhere. The ring walks for the main event run long once the music, the pyrotechnics and the introductions are included.
Then the distance. From the upper tier, the ring is a lit square far below and the fighters are recognisable mainly by the colour of their shorts. Almost everyone above the first tier watches the punches on the big screens at each end and the action in the ring with their own eyes, switching between the two. That is not a complaint. The noise of 90,000 people reacting to a knockdown arrives a fraction of a second before the replay, and it is the reason people buy a ticket rather than watch at home.
The floor seats are a different experience. They are flat, so a tall person in the row in front matters more than in a raked stand, and the nearest rows are within a few metres of the apron. Most people on the floor watch the ring directly.
The late finish and getting home
A main event that ends near midnight leaves 90,000 people trying to leave Wembley Park at the same time. The station queue system that works on football days is used, but the hour is later and last trains become a real concern for anyone travelling beyond London. Our visitor's guide to Wembley covers the stations and queue routes; plan to leave the stadium around an hour after the final bell, not five minutes.
Weather and the undercard
Nothing on a boxing bill is cancelled for light rain, but floor seats are exposed in a way the bowl is not. A summer evening usually makes this irrelevant, which is one reason the dates are what they are.
Wembley Arena is a different building with its own boxing history
The indoor arena a few hundred yards from the stadium opened in 1934 as the Empire Pool, built for the swimming at the British Empire Games. It became Wembley Arena in 1978 and has since carried sponsors' names. It hosted the boxing at the 1948 London Olympics. And for most of the second half of the twentieth century it was one of the main venues for British world title fights.
| Date | Fight | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Sep 1980 | Alan Minter v Marvin Hagler | Hagler TKO 3, won undisputed middleweight title |
| 1984 | Frank Bruno v James Smith | Smith KO 10 |
| Mar 1986 | Frank Bruno v Gerrie Coetzee | Bruno KO 1 |
| 24 Sep 1994 | Lennox Lewis v Oliver McCall | McCall TKO 2, won WBC heavyweight title |
| 12 Dec 2020 | Anthony Joshua v Kubrat Pulev | Joshua KO 9, with a crowd limited to 1,000 |
The Minter-Hagler night is remembered for what followed the stoppage. Minter was cut badly and the fight was stopped in the third; bottles and cans were thrown into the ring and Hagler was escorted out without his belts being presented in the ring. The Board of Control and the venue faced hard questions afterwards, and the night is still cited when crowd segregation at boxing is discussed.
Lewis v McCall was the opposite kind of shock. Lewis was the WBC champion and favourite; McCall dropped him with a counter right hand in the second round, and the referee stopped it after Lewis rose on unsteady legs. That defeat set up the chain that led to Bruno's title a year later, in the stadium next door.
The arena holds a small fraction of what the stadium does for boxing, and it remains the more common venue: a show there is an ordinary promotion, a show in the stadium an event. Search results mix the two constantly. If a source says "Wembley" without "Stadium" or "Arena", check the year.
Wembley against Britain's other stadium fights
Wembley does not have a monopoly on stadium boxing. It has the biggest figures, but the habit of putting a ring in a football or rugby ground has a long history across Britain.
| Venue | Year | Main event | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| White City, London | 1939 | Len Harvey v Jock McAvoy | Crowd reported at 90,000 or more; long the British record |
| Highbury, London | 1966 | Muhammad Ali v Henry Cooper | World heavyweight title; Ali won on cuts in round six |
| Cardiff Arms Park | 1993 | Lennox Lewis v Frank Bruno | Lewis retained WBC title, stopping Bruno in round seven |
| Old Trafford, Manchester | 1993 | Chris Eubank v Nigel Benn II | Unification at super-middleweight, ended in a draw |
| Millennium Stadium, Cardiff | 2007 | Joe Calzaghe v Mikkel Kessler | Calzaghe unified super-middleweight titles on points |
| City of Manchester Stadium | 2008 | Ricky Hatton v Juan Lazcano | Hatton won on points in his home city |
| Principality Stadium, Cardiff | 2018 | Anthony Joshua v Joseph Parker | Joshua won on points, unifying three heavyweight belts |
| Tottenham Hotspur Stadium | 2021 | Oleksandr Usyk v Anthony Joshua | Usyk won Joshua's titles on points |
The Cardiff stadiums deserve a sentence of their own. The Millennium Stadium, later the Principality, has a closing roof, which makes it the one major British stadium where a fight in winter is practical. Joshua fought there twice in quick succession, against Carlos Takam in October 2017 and Parker in March 2018, both outside the normal summer window.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is Wembley's real rival now. It is smaller, holds fewer for boxing and has a closer bowl, so the atmosphere is tighter. It has staged Usyk against Joshua, Fury against Derek Chisora on a cold night in December 2022 and Chris Eubank Jr against Conor Benn in April 2025, among others. The choice between the two is often about dates as much as size: Wembley's football commitments come first, Tottenham has its own fixtures, and a promoter takes whichever ground is free on the weekend the television deal needs.
For a broader comparison of the grounds themselves, our list of the largest football stadiums in England gives the football capacities that boxing layouts start from.
Why stadium boxing happens in summer and nearly always at heavyweight
Look at the months in the Wembley list: April, May, June, July, August, September. Never October to March. Three things are pushing the dates into that window and they reinforce one another.
The weather and the floor seats
The most expensive tickets are on the floor, under open sky. A ring is covered and the fighters are dry, but the people who paid most for their seats are not. Rain on a February night would empty the floor or ruin the event, and no insurer or promoter wants that risk. Spring, summer and early autumn reduce it. They do not remove it, which is why the floor seats on a July night still sometimes need waterproofs.
The football calendar
Wembley is the home of the England national team and of the FA's cup finals and the EFL play-off finals, and those come first. The stadium also stages summer concerts. A boxing date has to fit into the gaps, and the gaps are mostly at either end of the summer: late April and May, around the cup finals, or September, before the autumn's internationals. The ring and the floor seating also take days to install and remove, so a free Saturday is not enough. The ground needs most of a week on either side.
Only a handful of names can sell 90,000 tickets
The third reason is the hardest. A stadium is a gamble: the costs of the venue, the build and the security are fixed, and a half-full Wembley is a commercial disaster, as Wilson discovered in 1924. A promoter only takes that risk on a fight the general public will pay for, and in British boxing that has nearly always meant a heavyweight title with a British name in it. Joshua has headlined three of the six modern bills; Fury, Dubois, Usyk and Froch the others. Froch and Groves are the exception, and they needed a grudge from a disputed first fight to get there.
- Heavyweight80.0%
- Super-middleweight10.0%
- Heavyweight v light-heavyweight10.0%
Main events at the old and new stadium from 1924 to 2025. Gibbons v Bloomfield in 1924 was a non-title bout between a heavyweight and a light-heavyweight moving up.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Heavyweight | 8bills |
| Super-middleweight | 1bills |
| Heavyweight v light-heavyweight | 1bills |
The pattern is unlikely to change soon. Smaller weight classes fill arenas easily and sell well on television, but filling a national stadium requires a fight that people who never watch boxing will talk about at work on Monday. Heavyweights have that reach and few others do. If you are more interested in the wider sport than the stadium, the combat sports section collects our boxing and MMA coverage, and the England hub links every guide in this series.