Team Boxing Idea 2020

I have often thought/wondered how best to structure it, if all the world's boxing authorities got together for one month of every year, to structure a teams boxing competition. Each evening of fights would pit the host country team against the visiting country team, and there would be three to five fights in the evening, all contributing to the overall teams battle score.


You could either have the weigh classes pre-set for all encounters, such as having the limitless heavy weight plus every second weight limit boundary from the top (making five) in use OR we could let the underdog for each match choose the 3-5 weight classes that will be used that evening.


I would say maybe go with the pre-set system (heavy weight plus every second weight limit boundary from the top) only for year one, and then, in later years, if tiny Nicaragua, Panama or El Salvador or Ecuador, Samoa, Albania, Swaziland, or Trinidad ever goes up against a huge opponent like USA, UK, Russia, China, Cuba, Brazil or Mex, then it should be allowed to choose which weight classes it thinks it may have a good chance to win in, and to set the weight limits for all fights that night so as to give itself the best chance.


Choosing the best system for deciding which team goes up against which other team to use is tricky, as we definitely do NOT want a system that has unfair asymmetric encounters in which one team has no chance at all and is 20 million to one odds to win its match, is only there to make up the numbers and has not brought its better fighters because they knew it would be a night of humiliation, and we would have to take travel costs into consideration when allocating opponents, especially for the small GDP countries. I am giving this a try here though:


A seeding system to make sure that we have fairly matched opponents might begin with giving the top 20 ranked fighters in each weight class points (100, 99, 98, ...) and as we add them up by country we find out where in the top-to-middle-to-bottom structure to place each country (with equal scores ties broken either by looking at earlier recent years, GDP or by paring the two up as obligatory opponents). Bearing in mind that each team will only have one opponent per year, we'd better make it a well-matched opponent for each team.


If the USA (or any other country) turns out to be so far ahead in the seedings that no other country would ever want to go against it, and that no other country would stand a realistic chance of beating it, then it may be best to split it up into individual states, each with their own team (of boxers who lived there as a child), who not only compete against each other, but also against all the other countries.


We could start the event off with the 16 highest seeded teams in the world overall all getting given one opponent in a 16-balls in one bowl uncompartmentalized drawing that decides who against who, with the winners going on to the Quarter Finals in Yr2, ... the winning teams advance to the next round and we could drop the defeated teams into the regional ladders at first. And all other teams get a most evenly matched regional opponent. Then from year four onwards we have maybe the top 6 or 10 teams in the global top level and all others in the regional lists who aspire to get into the global one. I would say let's allow the underdog team to set all the weight classes for the encounter, whenever we have two 5s lines to cross between the two teams' world seeding score. There is a line between 5 & 6 and one between 10 & 11 so teams seeded 1 and 14 are two lines apart. Having said this, I am tempted to add further lines after every even number - agreed or not? And then after year 4 we would no longer have the original 16 team tournament as our race for first place, but a new ladder that is based on each team's recent results in this system - each team that wins moves up a level.


So a world teams trophy system - if we dream it - is one day born, and it makes each team very important.


And whereas most sports put the same teams into the finals year after year after year after year, ours will be different, and better, as ours will see top seeded teams beaten more often (because they had to fight in their weakest weight classes only when up against a smaller, lower ranked country). And this is why the possibilities are endless, and the action will be fabulous, and the world will be a better place.