Trends in Professional Female Boxing and World Title Fights – 1993 to 2012

WBAN has published the stats from 1993-2012  that Dee Williams has been keeping in the sport. Dee Williams has been,  and continues to be an invaluable source for WBAN, and the sport.  We have updated this trend by adding the boxer count by year for the same four countries as before.

The stats from 1993 to 2012, show us an interesting trend that is going on in the sport. The information was converted from an Excel Spreadsheet and it contains our number of fights per quarter data for the whole world, and for USA, Germany, Argentina and Mexico. The graph of the data for the four separate countries really tells the story of what’s happened.

Huge growth of the pro sport in the USA peaked about 10 years ago in 2002. Sport has slowly fallen off here ever since. The German boom came later and peaked five years later, about 2007. It looked for a while like the activity there could equal that in the US by 2008, instead they peaked too and are now falling off fast.

Possible reason perhaps? Regina Halmich fought her last fight in November 2007, and her boxing career was what propelled the German boom up until then.

Williams’ stats indicate that the sport is still growing worldwide but only barely, and that’s because the big decline in the old power houses like the USA and Germany has been offset by rapid growth in South America, especially in Argentina and in Mexico. There are now more women’s pro fights per quarter in Mexico than there are here in the USA, and the number of fights in Argentina is about the same as here.

It’s a bit simplistic to boil it down to four countries, but those four do tell the basic story of where the sport has grown and why. The rapid growth in the USA happened while Christy Martin was at her prime, the peak came right when Laila Ali started to fight world title fights, and the sport was already in decline here in terms of number of fights by the time she ended her run. In Mexico, they have been paced by the likes of Jackie Nava and Ana Maria Torres, the Argentinians first by Marcela Acuna and now the younger generation there of Yesica Bopp, Erica Farias etc.

Williams said, “I think the quality of the fights has steadily improved, the skills levels are still increasing, and the best fights are getting better, quite independent of these overall fight frequency numbers the top competition everywhere continues to improve. But where you’re going to have to go to face that top competition could be about to change.”

It could also change if we see the popularity of amateur boxing among women boxers feed into
the pro sport, as the amateurs are generally being dominated by different countries than the pros,

One thing for sure that will be very interesting is to see is which countries produce the Olympic medalists and whether that has any effect on trends in the pros a few years later.

Another reason why we have the fall-off in the USA, could be due to with the rise of women’s MMA. It is hard to say at this point.

Please note that on the graph, that 2012/Q2 stats are still being added to as there are two weekends left in the quarter, so the last points on all the graphs are a little low and we won’t get final numbers for a few weeks more.

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