No one man should have all that power (or should he?)

“When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.” - President Harry S. Truman

Don’t worry. I’m not about to get political, this is still about sport.

However, whilst in matters of government the efficiency of which President Truman spoke is secondary to the enfranchisement of the people, that may not always be the case in private enterprise – or in Sport.

Across the sporting landscape there are a plethora of leagues, tournaments and rankings governed by an equally large array of ownership and management structures. There are football clubs owned by thousands of fans and there are football clubs steered by a single benefactor. There are leagues which operate democratically and there are those led by a singular power.

Many of the world’s most popular sporting institutions have storied histories, over which teams and franchises have taken a role in steering them. The Premier League – a 1992 breakaway from the original Football League, which dated back to 1888 – has a democratic one club, one vote structure. The NFL, America’s most popular sports league, sees its commissioner elected by a two-thirds majority vote by its member franchises.

However, these historic structures are not universally loved. The doomed and despised European Super League was born of Europe’s largest football clubs’ fundamental disagreement with their domestic leagues’ views on what constitutes equitable revenue sharing. The democratic structure of these leagues prevented this Super Club minority from shifting the needle in their existing environment – so they sought to break away.

However, no matter how elitist and anti-competitive it seemed, was merely an attempt to restructure into a new league. The new coalition would still have required collaboration and constitutional agreements between its new members – an aristocracy, perhaps, rather than a dictatorship.

On the contrary, nowhere is the very structure of a sport more widely derided than in boxing.

There used to be a single champion in each of the sport’s weight classes. In 1987, however, Mike Tyson became the first ‘undisputed’ heavyweight world champion by unifying the three belts of the recognised governing bodies; The World Boxing Association (founded in 1921 as the National Boxing Association), the World Boxing Council (1963) and the International Boxing Federation (1983). The fragmentation of boxing titles has only become more extreme with the World Boxing Organisation gaining widespread recognition in 2007 and the more recent emergence of the International Boxing Organisation.

With this array of governing bodies, there is debate in each weight class as to who is the ‘true champion’. Whilst giving extra legitimacy to the few that claim ‘undisputed status’ – there have been only six in the four-belt era – it creates confusion and even apathy amongst fans.

It wasn’t until six years after Tyson unified the heavyweight titles, in which time Riddick Bowe split them once more, that the UFC was founded. It wasn’t until Dana White became the company’s President in the early 2000s that the organisation really began to grow. He owned 9% of the UFC when its parent company was purchased by WME-IMG (now Endeavor) for over $4bn.

As the single most dominant MMA championship in the world, the UFC builds its cards with the fights fans want to see. Each weight division has one champion. This clarity and centralised control is a difference that many in boxing, not least the fans, look upon with envy. There is very rarely a case of a UFC fighter dodging an opponent – there isn’t another payday out there.

“You look at the UFC model, which we’re all very envious of, which is one promotional company, if you like, and one belt. That’s where I want to get to in boxing. It’s going to take a lot of work, but we’re putting a blueprint together for that and it’s something we’re going to be pushing hard for in 2021 as we continue to expand.” - Eddie Hearn, President of Matchroom Sport

It’s little surprise that Hearn, a boxing promoter, would like more control and a more rigid matchmaking process. The fans, too, would certainly benefit from a single boxing authority and the more reliable matching of top ranked fighters. However, would the fighters themselves suffer?

Recent weeks and months have brought a cloud over the UFC as it has become known that the minimum payments to fighters, who risk serious injury, is just $12,000. From a company with 2020 revenues of a reported $890m, that is a paltry sum. The bad press has only been exacerbated by influencer turned new-era-boxer Jake Paul's recent Twitter exchange with White, who some commentators feel is losing his grip on the company he helped take stratospheric from near bankruptcy.

It would appear that dictatorship can bring efficiency to sports organisations. However, as with government, this often means a forfeit of equitable recompense for those that turn the cogs of the machine.

What sports such as boxing and the UFC may truly need is a benevolent dictator... and how many of those have we seen?