UFC / TKO pushing Muhammad Ali Act amendment to award their own boxing belts

UFC parent company TKO is looking to get into the boxing business, but they’ll need to make some changes to the existing legal structure of the sport to do so.

The Muhammad Ali Act was created to protect boxers from being exploited by promoters, and while it’s not perfect it has held up pretty well despite the sweet science being full of sketchy people looking to take advantage of athletes. Its days may be numbered, though, as TKO is currently looking to chip away at some of those protections.

News came out earlier this week that TKO is requesting an amendment to the Ali Act, with Association of Boxing Commissions president Michael Mazzulli stating, “The board of directors is working with them to make sure the ABC is still part of the federal law.”

Now BoxingScene has more details.

“The promotion is seeking to function like the UFC model by awarding its own ‘TKO’ belts to the champions of the limited weight classes once the promotion begins staging bouts, likely in 2026,” Lance Pugmire reported.

“Like the UFC, they want to sign fighters, put them in a league and provide belts to them,” an anonymous official told Pugmire.

This tracks with what we’ve heard from UFC CEO Dana White, who will be running the new boxing league for TKO. He’s said he has no interest in working with the sanctioning bodies that currently operate within boxing that determine who fights who for belts.

“I am going to create our own belt,” he said back in March. “But we got to figure that out. I am not interested in working with sanctioning bodies. I have no interest in it whatsoever.”

Is that the only change UFC / TKO are gunning for? An amendment is no small feat, and there are plenty of other clauses in the Muhammad Ali act that prevent the compete UFC-ification of boxing. Exclusive long-term contracts are illegal, and full financial disclosure of all payments are mandatory. There’s a lot of ways the UFC blurs the line between promoter and manager that are illegal under the Ali Act.

Will they really go ahead and push an amendment through just to tweak the rule demanding belts be handled by sanctioning bodies and not promoters? Or is this the Trojan horse leading to a full overhaul of the act that will allow TKO to build another UFC in boxing?