How it works
Method
One model, five sources, two cards, one merged view — and every number on the site explained.
Reading the tables
Headers with a dotted underline explain themselves on hover (or with a tap on a phone). The same definitions, gathered here:
- Rank
- The boxer's place in the sanctioning body's official ranking. “C”: world champion, above No. 1. No. 1 is the leading contender for the title.
- Change
- Places gained (▲, in green) or lost (▼, in red) since the ranking published a month ago (1M), three months ago (3M), six months ago (6M) or a year ago (1Y). “New”: not ranked back then. A dot: no archive old enough to compare yet.
- Trend
- The average change across every sanctioning body that ranks the boxer, over the chosen period. ▲ 1.5: a place and a half gained on average; a dash: no movement.
- Avg.
- The boxer's average rank across the bodies that rank them: a world title counts as 0, No. 1 as 1, and so on. The lower the number, the better the ranking. Example: No. 2 with the WBC and No. 4 with the IBF give 3.0.
- Bodies
- How many sanctioning bodies rank the boxer, out of those that rank this division (3/5: three out of five). The more there are, the sturdier the average; when it rests on a single one, it is greyed out.
- Spread
- The gap between the boxer's best and worst rank. 0: every body agrees. In red from 6: they clearly disagree (No. 1 with one, No. 9 with another).
- Composite ladder
- A ranking no sanctioning body publishes: boxers sorted by average rank, then, when tied, by how many bodies rank them.
- Status
- Undisputed: all four major belts (WBC, WBA, WBO, IBF) on the same head. Unified: at least two. Interim: a stopgap title, until the reigning champion (injured, inactive) returns or a fight settles it. Vacant: no champion right now.
Why an average? Each sanctioning body ranks in its own way: a boxer at No. 2 with one can be No. 9 with another. The average says where they stand overall, the spread says whether the bodies agree about them, and the number of bodies says how many opinions it rests on.
The rankings
The shape of a ladder
Every sanctioning body publishes the same structure: a champion's seat, then numbered contenders. FightAnnex keeps it exactly as it is, so each body's own order always stays readable. The depths differ — fifteen places for most, forty at the WBC, up to a hundred at the IBO.
Men's and women's are two competitions
A division is a pair (gender, weight class), never a weight class on its own. The two cards differ in structure: the men's includes bridgerweight at 224 lb, sanctioned by the WBC alone; the women's adds atomweight at 102 lb and squeezes the top of the table. 18 men's divisions, 18 women's.
Five formats, none built for this
The IBF offers an API and twenty years of archives. The WBA and WBO publish monthly PDFs — three divisions per page for the WBA, which calls for a column-by-column extraction. The WBC puts up one page per division. The IBO publishes its ranking as an image: it takes a browser to fetch it, then text recognition to read it.
One boxer, five spellings
The sanctioning bodies don't spell names the same way. In a cross-check of the four majors, 42 of the 188 champions listed didn't match — typos, different publication dates, or “super” and “regular” titles side by side.
Variants are kept rather than overwritten, so searching for a misspelling still brings up the right profile. Anything that remains ambiguous goes to manual review instead of being settled at random.
Movement
No sanctioning body publishes usable movement data: it has to be read by comparing two archived rankings. A snapshot is kept only when the ranking has actually changed, so the history builds itself. For now, only the IBF goes back far enough for every window; the others fill up month by month.
The tier list
Every ranked boxer in a weight class is placed in a tier, based on their positions in the five official rankings. The rules are fixed and applied as they stand, with no personal opinion: the tier list changes when the rankings change.
- S
- World champions. Holds a WBC, WBA, WBO or IBF world title — unified champions first.
- A
- Elite. Interim champion, No. 1 or No. 2 with a major body, or top 5 with two majors.
- B
- Contenders. Top 10 with a major body, or IBO champion.
- C
- Ranked. Ranked by at least one major body.
- D
- IBO ranked. Ranked by the IBO only.
The “major sanctioning bodies” are the WBC, WBA, WBO and IBF; the IBO, newer and less closely followed, counts separately. Within a tier, boxers are sorted from best to least well ranked. “Former world champion” marks a past holder of a major belt.
World titles
On each profile, the “World titles” section brings two sources together, each in its own role.
- Reigning: the sanctioning bodies' official rankings, as everywhere on the site. Every champion in a ranking has their title on their profile, dated when the day it was won is known.
- History and dates: Wikipedia's lists of world champions (CC BY-SA 4.0 licence), re-read every week. A reign is attached to a profile only if it can mean no one else: same gender, a neighbouring weight class, a plausible age. When in doubt, no title rather than a title credited to the wrong boxer.
- When the two disagree, the most recent date wins. A reign Wikipedia calls “ongoing” but that a later ranking contradicts becomes end date unknown; a title won after the latest ranking is shown according to Wikipedia.
The trajectory, below the movement table, plots the boxer's rank with each sanctioning body across the archived rankings — one band per body, each on its own scale, with a gold line marking the title. A gap means the body published its ranking without them.
The fights
The calendar brings together fights announced by the WBC and picked up from BoxRec, plus those added by the team. It can be filtered by gender, weight class and sanctioning body; headliners are fights featuring a world champion, or two highly ranked boxers.
Each fight carries labels, all in the same format:
- Unification
- Two world champions from different major sanctioning bodies, in the same weight class. “Champion vs champion”: two champions from different weight classes. “Champion”: a reigning champion steps into the ring.
- Rematch
- The two boxers have met before; “immediate” when the first fight was less than a year ago. “Trilogy” for the third fight, then “4th fight”… The card recounts their last fight and gives the head-to-head record.
- Disputed
- Their last fight ended in a draw, a split decision (the judges divided), a majority decision, or a no contest.
- Stakes
- Interim, vacant title, eliminator (the winner becomes the official challenger), Silver (the WBC's secondary belt), mandatory or voluntary defence.
Rematches are drawn from the boxers' records on Wikipedia, re-read every week. Two different articles mean two different people: a namesake never creates a false rematch. A boxer without an article has no known record; the team can then flag the rematch by hand.
Updates and errors
Every week, on its own
A robot collects the five rankings every Wednesday morning, compares them with the previous ones, then publishes. A reading that no longer looks like the previous week's ranking — unreadable names, missing positions — is rejected: the site then keeps the previous version rather than showing errors. Sanctioning bodies usually publish once a month: each ranking's date is shown next to its tab.
Report an error
Every profile and every ranking has a “Report an error” link. The report goes to the team, who correct the profile if needed; an email address, optional, lets you get a reply and is never published.
Where the data comes from
Beyond the rankings
Sanctioning bodies provide ranks, not faces. Wikidata links 811 profiles to a verified identity — date of birth, height, and a BoxRec ID for 650 of them. Wikimedia provides 227 freely licensed photos, credited on each profile. The other boxers have no known free photo: they get the mascot's portrait, Monsieur or Madame Stickman, which makes no claim to be a photo.
Announced fights come from the WBC's calendar and from BoxRec's, which offers no machine access: its pages are collected one by one in a signed-in browser — 249 fights involving ranked boxers so far. The profiles of the 71 highest-ranked boxers were collected there too (up-to-date record, stance, reach, debut) before BoxRec brought in its anti-bot check, which is where collection stops.
What the site knows, and what it doesn't
Four sanctioning bodies out of five print nothing but names. The IBO is the exception: its table carries the record, KOs, age, form over six fights and the date of the last fight. Those fields are extracted and, thanks to identity resolution, also benefit the profiles shared with the other four.
Where nothing is published, the profile shows N/A rather than hiding the line: missing data is information in itself. Nothing is made up to fill a gap.
Finally, extraction is automated, and the IBO's relies on text recognition from an image — if anything differs, the sanctioning body's own publication prevails.
- sanctioning bodies
- 5
- divisions
- 36
- ladders
- 169
- positions
- 4,451