How many times should a fighter fight in a year?

5-10. 3 big fights with top contenders/champions and the rest stay busy/tune up fights. You could keep boxing on regular cable if boxers fought that frequently, and blue chip fighters wouldn't need to spar so much during their long layoffs. They could get paid while earning ring experience and staying in front of their audience, building their brand.

Everybody used to fight 10-20 times a year. You can heal from a fight in a week or month depending how bad you get beat up. You see amateurs with 300 fights because they fight every week for years even if it is only three rounds. The reason top boxers only fight two or three times in the US per year is because it takes that long to publicize and set up pay per views. That's no reason for non pay per view fighters to be lazy though. Especially, when you see guys just starting their careers having a fight every month the first two years after they turn pro.

 

I wonder how much of that was thanks to them being on German cable instead of American pay per view?

 

That's even more sensible than what I said.

 

I'd say 3-4 at least, prospects who are building their way through the ranks probably a few more.

 

3-4 and not once every other year like ward

 

Three is the magic number for champions.

After all these years I still have not gotten use to two per year - makes a career feel like it's stalling.

Crawford and Golovkin are setting the standard and will (hopefully) continue to do so.

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

...may i ask a how many times does those old school guys fight in a year? just got curious

 

People are always doing everything for him. Fulltime politico my ass.

 

I would say 3 on average but it depends on how much punishment you are taking in the fights

 

Depends on the period of a guys career.

Guys coming up should be able to fight every other month.

Elite P4P guys, probably about twice a year if we're being honest.

Regular champ should be able to fight 3...maybe 4 times a year

 

It's not selfish at all it just shows that today people are softer but it is an improvement on the days when the fighters didn't make as much

 

Id like to see top fighters go back to fighting 4 times a year.

 

They should it would be better for the sport and even with the amount of champions around it would increase the chance of unification fights

 

But do fighters make more by fighting less? And did they make less money back in the day?

The John L. Sullivan vs James J. Corbett fight netted Corbett 45 grand which in 1892 money was about 1.1 million dollars.

In 1910 Jim Jeffries fought Jack Johnson and Johnson got $120,000 worth 3 million dollars in today's money.

Let's take boxing's economic pulse in 1927 for the Dempsey-Tunney rematch.

Joe Louis earned $625,916 to fight Billy Conn in 1946 which would be equivalent with inflation to 7.5 million dollars today.

For Rocky Marciano vs Archie Moore, Rocky earned $468,374 more than 4 million by today's standards.

More to the point, Ray Robinson fought Carmen Basilio for the first time in 1957. Ray got $483,666 and Basilio received $211,679. With inflation, $483,666 would be equivalent to slightly more than 4 million dollars.

Ali vs Frazier 1 1971 both guaranteed 2.5 million dollars = 14.5 million today.