The Year So Far
Five months in, the 2026 Fight of the Year race has its first real reshuffle. April closed with a 12-round lightweight technical war on top and a list that felt provisional, the way every first-quarter ballot does. May answered. A heavyweight brawl in Manchester that the major outlets were calling Fight of the Year before the final bell stopped ringing. The biggest fight in Japanese history in front of 55,000 at the Tokyo Dome. A Glory kickboxing champion one second from the most stunning upset the sport has ever recorded, under the lights at the Pyramids of Giza. The fight that led this list a month ago sits third now, and it did not have to get worse for that to happen. That is what a loaded month does to a ranking.
The criteria, stated plainly so the rankings are arguable on their own terms. Drama matters. Round-by-round competitiveness matters. Two-way action matters. Finishes matter most when they cap a fight that was a fight. Stakes matter too - a great scrap between two ranked-fifteenth contenders rates below a competitive title fight between top-five names, and a one-sided night between elite fighters can still earn its placement because of who was in it and what was on the line. FOTY rewards action. The names on the marquee and the stakes are how the list orders itself when the action is close.
These are the ten fights leading the race through May. We re-rank monthly. The next disruption points land in June: Jesse Rodriguez against Antonio Vargas on the 13th carries the highest finish ceiling on the calendar, and Xander Zayas against Jaron Ennis in Brooklyn on the 27th is the kind of young-elite matchup that produces year-end fights when it goes long.
Action wins FOTY. Stakes lift it. The fights that finish at the top of the year-end ballot are the ones with both.
10. Serhii Bohachuk vs Radzhab Butaev - February 1, Zuffa Boxing 2 Co-Main
Ten rounds of close-quarters slugging on the same Las Vegas card as Gvozdyk-Kalajdzic, and the fight that slid the furthest as May filled the top of the list. Neither man tried to create distance once, because neither felt safe doing it. Bohachuk, up from 154 after another round of scale trouble, edged a split decision (96-94, 96-94, with the third card 96-94 the other way) on the back of sweeping the final three rounds. Butaev, the smaller former WBA welterweight beltholder, was the sharper counter-puncher early and dug the body before Bohachuk’s work upstairs took over. The argument against it is the absence of a knockdown or a finish in a fight that begged for one in the eighth and the tenth. The argument for it is that ten straight rounds of two-way exchange between heavy-handed middleweights is its own form of high-end action. It opened the year at seventh. It sits tenth now because three May fights walked in with everything it has and more.
9. Oleksandr Gvozdyk vs Radivoje Kalajdzic - February 1, Zuffa Boxing 2
The cleanest momentum-swing knockout of the year so far. Gvozdyk dropped Kalajdzic with a straight right in the first and looked sharp through six - jab working, distance managed, the finish projecting on schedule. He was up 60-52, 60-52, 59-53 going into the seventh. Then Kalajdzic landed his own straight right to the body, slid back half a step, and came again with a jab and one more straight right that put Gvozdyk down far worse than the man he had been beating all night. Gvozdyk rose at four, fell backward into his own corner, and referee Ray Corona stopped it. A clean stoppage reads one way on paper. The fact that the stopped man had been four rounds up is what turns it into an FOTY-grade swing rather than a routine finish.
8. Oleksandr Usyk vs Rico Verhoeven - May 23, Pyramids of Giza
The most dramatic single round of the year, stapled to the most disputed stoppage. Rico Verhoeven, the Glory kickboxing king in only his second professional boxing bout, was ahead on the cards heading into the eleventh and one second from the biggest upset the sport has ever recorded. Usyk found a right uppercut in the final thirty seconds, dropped him, and referee Mark Lyson waved it off at 2:59 with the round all but expired and Verhoeven back on his feet, rocked, still trying to defend. The placement is the hardest call on this list. The stakes and the drama both sit near the very top - a unified heavyweight champion against a crossover novelty in front of the Pyramids, decided in the last breath of the penultimate round. What holds it at eighth is that the ten rounds before the finish were a cautious chess match more than a firefight, and that the finish itself is still being argued over a week later. A moment that will headline every 2026 retrospective, attached to ten rounds that were closer to a feeling-out than a war.
7. Deontay Wilder vs Derek Chisora - April 4, O2 Arena
The hundredth combined fight of two retiring heavyweights, each man’s fiftieth. Wilder dropped Chisora twice, lost a point, and took a split decision (115-111, 115-113 his way, 115-112 the other). Compubox had Chisora landing 143 of 385, Wilder 125 of 341, with Chisora edging the power count. Thirty-six minutes of the kind of heavyweight fight that does not exist in technical seminars - both men hurt, both firing back, neither willing to take a knee on a night neither could afford to lose. It ranks below the more technically complete fights above it because the flow was choppier and the cards did not match what most at ringside saw. It ranks where it does because the building was electric for thirty-six straight minutes, and the heavyweight division does not produce many of those nights anymore.
6. Subriel Matias vs Dalton Smith - January 10, WBC Super Lightweight Title
Five rounds of a real fight before Smith landed the overhand right at 2:24 of the fifth and finished it with the follow-up. The KO5 line undersells what the rounds were. Matias is one of the most feared champions at 140 for a reason - pressure, body work, and an attritional style that has broken better fighters than Smith looked on paper. Smith stood his ground from the first bell, stayed off the ropes, and landed enough straight rights through three to convince Matias he could not simply walk through him. The finishing sequence did not come from nowhere. It came in the round the fight was always going to break, and Smith got there first with the punch he had been setting up. The upset magnitude - Matias 21-1 walking in - and the cleanness of the finish keep it ahead of more dramatic rounds-counted candidates below.
5. Nick Ball vs Brandon Figueroa - February 7, WBA Featherweight Title
Down on the cards heading into the twelfth, Figueroa landed an overhand left thirty-two seconds into the round, dropped Ball, then put him through the ropes with the follow-up to take the WBA strap inside the final round of a fight he was losing. Last-round comeback knockouts are the rarest finish in boxing. The fights that go that deep almost always end on the scorecards. This was the clean version of the exception - Figueroa knew exactly which punch he needed and held it back until the round he had to land it. Ball, twenty-eight and undefeated walking in, was the better fighter for forty-two and a half minutes. Figueroa was the better fighter for thirty-two seconds, and that was all of it.
4. Najee Lopez vs Manuel Gallegos - March 13, ProBox TV
The purest action fight of the year, on the smallest stage on the list. A headbutt opened Lopez over the right eye in the second. Gallegos cracked him with a counter right in the seventh and put him on the canvas. Lopez beat the count, walked straight back into the fire, and the fight stayed in close range until he landed the left-right that wobbled Gallegos at the start of the eighth. The flurry that followed forced referee Christopher Young to wave it off at 2:41. The WBA Continental Americas and WBO Latino light heavyweight straps on the line do not move the needle on their own. What moves it is that this was eight rounds of all-out boxing with a comeback finish, on a card most major outlets were not covering live. Several writers filed it as their year-end frontrunner the night it happened. They were not wrong, and only the stakes of the fights above it keep it from the top three.
3. Andy Cruz vs Raymond Muratalla - January 24, IBF Lightweight Title
Last month’s number one, and still the cleanest 12-round technical war the year has produced. Nothing about it got worse in May. Two top-five lightweights, no knockdowns, every round contested at championship speed. Cruz’s southpaw counters were the sharpest work of the night through eight, his footwork dragging Muratalla into reset patterns the champion clearly had not planned for. Muratalla’s body work and late pressure decided it on two of three cards (118-110, 116-112, with the third 114-114), and anyone scoring it the other way had a defensible case. It dropped from first to third for one reason only: a heavyweight war with a finish and the highest-stakes night of the year arrived above it. A no-knockdown twelve-rounder that still sits this high in June tells you how high both men were operating from the opening round.
2. Naoya Inoue vs Junto Nakatani - May 2, Tokyo Dome
The biggest fight in Japanese history, and the highest-stakes night the sport has staged all year. Fifty-five thousand inside the Tokyo Dome, all four super bantamweight belts on the line, two pound-for-pound top-five names, neither ducking the other. Inoue took the unanimous decision (116-112, 115-113, 116-112) to stay undisputed and undefeated at 33-0, denying Nakatani the chance to become the fourth Japanese fighter to win titles in four weight classes. A clash of heads in the tenth opened a cut above Nakatani’s left eye, and blood poured into it across the final two rounds as Inoue closed the show. It ranks here on stakes rather than violence - a controlled masterclass more than a firefight, competitive without ever becoming a war. By the criteria, the magnitude of the occasion and the level both men fought at lift a clean decision above three more brutal fights below it. The only night of 2026 that the whole sport stopped to watch at once.
1. Fabio Wardley vs Daniel Dubois - May 9, Co-op Live Arena
The fight the rest of the year now measures itself against. Dubois was on the canvas in the first round and again in the third, hurt and behind, against a Wardley who looked for stretches like he might end it early. Then Dubois fought his way back into it, took the fight over through the middle rounds, and broke Wardley down until referee Howard Foster stepped in during the eleventh to spare him the rest. Two-time heavyweight champion, WBO title around his waist, on a night that swung hard in both directions before it was settled. ESPN and Yahoo filed it as Fight of the Year in real time, and the case is straightforward: knockdowns both ways, a champion-grade recovery, and a finish that capped a fight neither man was coasting through for a single round. Cruz-Muratalla set the technical bar in January. Wardley-Dubois cleared it with the one thing that fight never had - a finish that ended a war. The new number one, and the standard the December ballot now has to beat.
What June Reshapes
The May standings post with the top three looking sturdier than any month this year, but June has the cards to bend the bottom half and test the top.
Jesse Rodriguez vs Antonio Vargas on June 13 carries the highest finish ceiling on the calendar - a pound-for-pound operator with stoppage power in front of him and a live opponent who has to take risks to win. A two-way finish there walks straight into the top half of this list. Xander Zayas vs Jaron Ennis in Brooklyn on June 27 is the young-elite matchup most likely to produce a year-end fight if it goes deep, with two of the best fighters under twenty-five in the sport meeting at junior middleweight while both still have everything to prove. Chris Billam-Smith vs Ryan Rozicki on June 6 is the pure-action wildcard, an all-or-nothing cruiserweight scrap of the kind that tends to overdeliver. None of them is guaranteed to make the list. All of them have the ceiling to.
The criteria do not change. The list will. The only thing this top ten has earned, five months in, is the right to be argued with.
Why We’re Tracking This Monthly
FOTY conversations almost always happen in December, when memory is short and the fights of January are a single sentence. By then, Cruz-Muratalla is “that technical war from early in the year” rather than the 12-round championship thriller anyone who watched it live remembers in detail. Najee Lopez vs Gallegos becomes “that ProBox card with the comeback knockout” rather than the eight rounds of all-out boxing it actually was. The fights of the first quarter get diluted by recency bias every year, and the December ballots reflect it.
Ringside tracks this differently. Monthly standings, ranked by the same criteria every time, with the fights from the back of the calendar still on the page when the fights of December arrive. By the time we publish the year-end ballot, every fight on it will have been re-evaluated against the rest of the year, month after month, and the order will reflect the year as it actually happened rather than the year as anyone remembered it last week.
See you in July.
Ranked by drama, two-way action, round-by-round competitiveness, and finish quality, weighted against the stakes - the names on the marquee and what was on the line lift fights up the page.