Champs and Titleholders By Countries

Around the same time last year, the United States was dominating the boxing title picture as always. They are miles ahead with 16 titles to the closest boxing power and long-time rival, Mexico with 8. Now, the rest of the world has caught up. The US is down to 9 tied with Mexico while Ukraine and Puerto Rico is just a couple of successful title challenges away. A mixture of 22 other countries from Haiti to Thailand to Spain has at least a world title to represent them in this distinguished list of countries.

As a new member of the 8CountNews team, I want to start something different for the sake of the nationalistic sweet science fans out there. Instead of listing the titleholders per division per sanctioning body, I will rank the countries by how many titles they have and maintain it as we move along every title fight.

I need to establish a few baseline rules so as not to instigate any untoward debates.

1. I will only consider the Ring magazine champions and titleholders from the 4 major sanctioning bodies - WBA, WBC, IBF & WBO. I know it's a never ending debate on the legitimacy of the alphabet organizations; nevertheless, they are the 4 that I will consider.

2. I count the titles not the titleholder. Therefore champs that hold multiple belts are counted by the number of belts they proudly wear around their waist. For example: Kelly Pavlik is counted thrice because he holds the WBC, WBO and Ring Middleweight titles.

3. The sanctioning bodies, specially the WBA, have the uncanny way of handing out belts like candies coming out of a piñata. So I excluded interim champs, WBA's regular champs (when there are unified champs), champs-in-recess, emeritus status champ, and whatever extra sanctioning fee driven title. For example: Panama's Celestino Caballero currently holds both the WBA and IBF Super Bantamweight titles. Aside from that, the WBA also has a WBA “regular” Super Bantamweight champ in Ireland’s Bernard Dunne and an interim champ in Thailand’s Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym. I will only consider Caballero’s titles and not Dunne’s nor Kratingdaenggym’s.

4. I will only consider the boxer's place of birth as their country. Jus soli not jus sanguinis. For example: Nonito Donaire is a US citizen but he was born and raised in the Philippines so count that for the Philippines. On the other hand, Brian Viloria was born in Hawaii but has Philippine ancestry so that gets tallied for the US.

So with those baseline rules in mind, here's the tally of current boxing titleholders by countries.