The WBA have announced that they\u2019ve \u201celevated\u201d Rolly Romero to \u201csuper champion\u201d status at welterweight, as it\u2019s been long enough since their last declaration that they were going to stop having so many \u201cchampions\u201d that they can just go back to doing things the way they prefer.<\/p>\n
Romero beat Ryan Garcia for the vacant WBA welterweight title in early May 2025, a little over a year ago, and has not defended the title once or fought since then. To look at the situation at least fairly, Romero (17-2, 13 KO) has reportedly been in negotiations to fight Manny Pacquiao, claiming that Pacquiao and his team were never serious about a potential January 2026 bout, and more recently with WBC titleholder Devin Haney, which has been an extensive back-and-forth on social media between the sides.<\/p>\n
The 30-year-old Romero\u2019s upset win over Garcia was a real shock to many, who had written Rolly off at higher levels after his stoppage losses to Gervonta \u201cTank\u201d Davis and Isaac \u201cPitbull\u201d Cruz in 2022 and 2024, at lightweight and super lightweight. But he made the big fight chance at welterweight stick.<\/p>\n
The WBA have also stated that Romero must face the winner of Saturday\u2019s fight between Shakhram Giyasov and Jack Catterall. They will meet on the Usyk vs Rico undercard, a fight that is now for the WBA\u2019s \u201cregular\u201d or \u201cworld\u201d welterweight title, which is an absolutely nonsense thing and always has been. Especially in this instance, where the winner between Giyasov (17-0, 10 KO) and Catterall (32-2, 14 KO) must now face Romero within 180. There\u2019s really no reason this wouldn\u2019t just be an \u201cinterim\u201d title fight, but perhaps sanctioning fee percentages are higher for a \u201cregular\u201d title than an \u201cinterim\u201d one.<\/p>\n
WBA nonsense aside, the overall ruling that the Giyasov vs Catterall winner will face Romero is basically fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The WBA have announced that they\u2019ve \u201celevated\u201d Rolly Romero to \u201csuper champion\u201d status at welterweight, as it\u2019s been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,6102,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-599916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-boxing-news","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599916","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=599916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}