Usyk is 38 now. He knocked out Dubois twice. He beat Fury and Joshua in succession. The Wilder fight gets mentioned as a possibility, which tells you how thin heavyweight has become when a shot fighter with four losses in six years is considered a logical next step for an undisputed champion.<\/p>\n
#2 Naoya Inoue fought four times in 2025. The fourth was a decision over David Picasso that set up a fight with Junto Nakatani. Nobody fights that often anymore at this level, and if Inoue beats Nakatani, the No. 1 spot is his.<\/p>\n
Dmitry Bivol at #3 beat Artur Beterbiev in the rematch, then had back surgery. He\u2019s been out since February.
Jesse BAM Rodriguez is 25 and unified at junior bantamweight. He destroyed Fernando Martinez in ten rounds. Rodriguez doesn\u2019t get the attention he\u2019s earned because he fights at 115 pounds, but he\u2019s younger than everyone ahead of him and has time to move up without forcing anything.<\/p>\n
Movement in the Rankings<\/p>\n
David Benavidez moves to cruiserweight in May to fight Gilberto Ramirez. If he wins, he\u2019s a three-division champion with options at light heavyweight still in play. Shakur Stevenson beat William Zepeda in July, showed he could trade when necessary. Now he moves up to 140 to fight Teofimo Lopez at the end of the month. A win over Lopez would push Stevenson higher on this list.<\/p>\n
Nakatani got a controversial decision over Sebastian Hernandez in December. The Inoue fight will tell us whether Nakatani belongs at the top or if he\u2019s a very good fighter who got close but couldn\u2019t finish. Devin Haney dominated Brian Norman Jr. to win the WBO welterweight title. He\u2019s 27, a three-division champion, and the Ryan Garcia fight didn\u2019t diminish him.<\/p>\n
Lopez fights Stevenson on January 31. He\u2019s shown he can beat elite fighters when he\u2019s locked in, the Lomachenko and Josh Taylor wins were dominant. Other fights have been less impressive. If Lopez is on against Stevenson, he wins. If he isn\u2019t, he loses.<\/p>\n
The pound-for-pound list shifts when someone retires, but it doesn\u2019t change the fact that these ten fighters are the best in the sport right now. Crawford leaving creates space, but it doesn\u2019t make anyone better than they were last week.<\/p>\n
ESPN Men\u2019s P4P Rankings<\/p>\n
Oleksandr Usyk (24-0, 15 KOs)\u00a0 Heavyweight
\nNaoya Inoue (32-0, 27 KOs)\u00a0 Junior featherweight
\nDmitry Bivol (24-1, 12 KOs)\u00a0 Light heavyweight
\nJesse Rodriguez (23-0, 16 KOs) Junior bantamweight
\nArtur Beterbiev (21-1, 20 KOs)\u00a0 Light heavyweight
\nDavid Benavidez (31-0, 25 KOs)\u00a0 Light heavyweight
\nShakur Stevenson (24-0, 11 KOs)\u00a0 Lightweight
\nJunto Nakatani (32-0, 24 KOs) Bantamweight
\nDevin Haney (33-0, 1 NC, 15 KOs) Welterweight
\nTeofimo Lopez Jr. (22-1, 13 KOs) Junior welterweight<\/p>\n
Tom Galm has covered the global boxing scene since 2014, specializing in heavyweight analysis, business trends, and fighter psychology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Usyk is 38 now. He knocked out Dubois twice. He beat Fury and Joshua in succession. The Wilder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-372146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}