Handicapping the Fighter of the Year race with half a year to go

Welcome to the first day of the rest of your year.

It’s July 1, six months down, six to go, and if you think hitting the halfway point of 2025 means we should by now have a halfway decent idea of who the Fighter of the Year will be – you’d be very wrong.

At the midway mark, there is no frontrunner, nobody with a clearly laid out path. 

It was entirely the opposite last year. When July 2024 began, it was all so clear-cut: If Oleksandr Usyk repeated his previous victory over Tyson Fury and retained the heavyweight championship of the world, that would be that. And if Usyk didn’t win and he and Fury each sported 1-1 records on the year, then whoever won the light heavyweight championship showdown between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol would have the pole position. The flowchart took about 30 seconds to draw up.

But in 2025, there is nobody in that Usyk spot of having accomplished something truly exceptional in the first half of the year and being locked into an opportunity to cement things in the second half. 

Rather, there are countless fighters with “if this, then that” hopes, and all of the “that” is accompanied by a side of caveats and contingencies.

Somebody has to win the award, though. So here’s every candidate I could conceive of, mostly in no particular order – because how do you put something this wide open and chaotic into any sort of order?

Dmitry Bivol: Let’s start with the boxer who scored probably the most all-around impressive elite-level win of the first six months of 2025. In February, Bivol avenged his October 2024 loss to Beterbiev, winning narrowly where previously he’d lost disputably. There’s talk of a trilogy fight, though nothing is on the schedule yet. 

If it happens, and if Bivol wins, he’ll have a strong case for Fighter of the Year – but he’ll also have two wins over a 40-year-old opponent that he already arguably deserved to beat the previous year. So on top of all the “ifs” of getting to and through a rubber match with Beterbiev, even if successful, Bivol will be left with the sort of campaign that can be toppled with one spectacular win from another corner of the boxing universe.

Junto Nakatani: The bantamweight badass scaling pound-for-pound lists had an undeniably strong first six months, scoring a pair of knockouts over fighters with a combined record coming in of 38-0. The problem is neither David Cuellar nor Ryosuke Nishida was considered any sort of threat. (Yes, Nishida had a belt, but he was still as high as a +770 betting underdog.) 

Nakatani would seem to need one more scalp bigger and better than Nishida to really be in the mix at the end of the year. There are rumors of a possible December fight with Ramon Cardenas, which could do the trick – but only as a fallback Fighter of the Year option if nobody else makes a real statement.

Naoya Inoue: “The Monster” is the logical next name to consider after his potential future rival Nakatani. Like Nakatani, Inoue already has two KO wins this year. It appears his third bout of the year – though not officially announced yet – will come against Murodjon Akhmadaliev on September 14. 

The slight smudge working against Inoue is that he is coming off a tougher-than-expected struggle against Cardenas that saw the pound-for-pounder have to climb off the deck to win. He may need to be closer to flawless against Akhmadaliev to turn heads – and he may need to fight a fourth time this year to solidify his claim, given the absence of a singular signature win on par with the Stephen Fulton KO that powered his 2023 campaign.

Murodjon Akhmadaliev: The oddsmakers have “MJ” a little more than a 6-to-1 underdog against Inoue. Whatever his slim chance of winning that fight is, his chance of being named Fighter of the Year is roughly equal to it.

Daniel Dubois: Sticking with the theme of “underdogs with a massive opportunity that probably won’t end well for them,” if Dubois – a +320 ’dog at FanDuel against Usyk – becomes heavyweight champion of the world by toppling an undefeated future Hall of Famer, then he may just be the man to beat for the year-end award. Then again, it’s never a sure thing if you only fight once all year, so Dubois may need to beat Usyk and repeat the feat in a rubber match before the year is out.

Terence Crawford: You can’t talk about the obstacles to being named Fighter of the Year off a single outing without talking about “Bud” Crawford, who hasn’t stepped into the ring twice in a single year the entire decade of the 2020s. And that ain’t changing in 2025. He almost won Fighter of the Year in 2023 off a single win over Errol Spence, only to see Inoue bump him with a late-December knockout. 

If Crawford beats the larger Saul “Canelo” Alvarez for the undisputed super middleweight championship, it’s one hell of an accomplishment. But there will be no encore performance for him in 2025. Here’s a relevant “did ya know”: The last boxer to capture the Boxing Writers Association of America’s Fighter of the Year honors after fighting just one time was George Foreman in 1994.

The Brian Norman Jnr vs. Devin Haney winner: Norman can improve to 3-0 on the year with by far his most high-profile win, or Haney, who outpointed faded Jose Ramirez in a Times Square stinker, can improve to 2-0. The likelihood of either man being named Fighter of the Year is greater than “none,” but still somewhere below “slim.”

The Jai Opetaia vs. Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez winner (if it happens): Copy-pasting the above and changing the names, Opetaia can improve to 3-0 on the year with by far his most high-profile win, or Ramirez, who outpointed faded Yuniel Dorticos this past weekend, can improve to 2-0. Considering a cruiserweight championship showdown between Opetaia and Ramirez is only in the “calling each other out” stages at the moment, their Fighter of the Year feasibility probably isn’t quite worth the digital ink I just spent on it.

Lamont Roach Jnr: This may be another waste of keystrokes, but Roach can enter the fringes of the conversation if he defeats Gervonta “Tank” Davis in their rematch, as he arguably deserved to do on March 1.

Vergil Ortiz Jnr: The Feb. 22 win over Israil Madrimov was impressive, but Ortiz still doesn’t have his follow-up scheduled. It’s hard to see the next fight making him Fighter of the Year-worthy, unless it’s against…

Jaron “Boots” Ennis: Stopping Eimantis Stanionis in six rounds was a statement. Now Ennis needs to make an even louder one in his junior middleweight debut to enter year-end awards chatter. There’s no particular reason to believe Ortiz-Ennis is coming this year, but if by some chance it does, the winner would absolutely be on the short list.

Agit Kabayel or Joseph Parker: Both heavyweight contenders scored sensational KO wins on the massive February 22 Saudi card, and they each have the same extreme-longshot path to a late Fighter of the Year push. They both need Usyk to beat Dubois on July 19, then one of them needs to become Usyk’s next challenger (before 2026 begins, obviously), and that man needs to somehow defeat Usyk. Like I said: Extreme long shot.

Oleksandr Usyk: Beating Dubois alone won’t give him a chance at becoming the back-to-back Fighter of the Year. To win this award, Usyk needs Parker or Kabayel as much as they need him.

David Benavidez: He looked outstanding against David Morrell. Would a win over, say, Callum Smith, and then a third win over someone similarly competent put “The Mexican Monster” in the mix? Perhaps, as long as pretty much every other name mentioned thus far in this article stumbles.

Manny Pacquiao: He’d need to defeat Mario Barrios (spoiler: not gonna happen), then he’d need to score another win at the same level or above. Even if those things occur, it’s a campaign much more likely to secure Comeback Fighter of the Year than Fighter of the Year. Then again, sentimentality can make year-end awards voters do strange things.

So, in the end, who will be the 2025 Fighter of the Year? I’m about 99% sure it will be one of the names in bold above. But the 1% chance it’s somebody who hasn’t even crossed my mind is, notably, not a 0% chance. All I know for now is that I can cross off Keyshawn Davis. Otherwise, there’s not much I’m willing to declare with certainty about the Fighter of the Year race as of July 1.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of and the author of 2014’s . He can be reached on , , or , or via email at [email protected].