Who runs bare-knuckle boxing

Promotions

A promotion stages fights and pays fighters. It does not regulate the sport, and its rankings describe its own roster rather than the sport as a whole. That distinction is the reason independent rankings exist.

BKB

BKB competes in the Trigon, a three-sided ring roughly sixteen feet per side. The promotion has consolidated several earlier brands, including BYB Extreme and Bad To The Bone, which matters when reading fighter records: a bout fought under a predecessor banner may or may not be counted depending on the source. BKB distributes through television and, since 2026, through a live partnership with TikTok that has made it one of the most-watched live sports properties on the platform.

BKFC

Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship was founded in 2018 by Philadelphia promoter David Feldman and is headquartered in Pennsylvania. It staged the first legally sanctioned bare-knuckle card in the United States since 1889 and remains the largest promotion in the sport, operating across dozens of countries. Conor McGregor became a part owner in 2024. BKFC fights in a circular two-rope ring.

Sanctioning and regulation

In the United States, bare-knuckle boxing is regulated the same way boxing and MMA are: by state athletic commissions, each with authority inside its own borders. For a card to be legal it must be explicitly sanctioned by the commission in that jurisdiction, and must satisfy medical requirements including pre-fight physicals, blood work, ringside physicians and ambulance provision.

The Association of Boxing Commissions

The ABC is not a regulator. It is the body through which individual commissions coordinate, and it publishes model rules that member commissions may adopt. Its approval of unified bare-knuckle rules in 2023 is the closest thing the sport has to a common standard. Commissions remain free to depart from it.

Tribal commissions

Sovereign tribal athletic commissions can sanction events independently of the surrounding state. This route predates state legalisation — the 2011 Yavapai Nation event was the modern sport's first sanctioned bout — and remains in use.

Outside the United States

Regulation varies enormously. Some jurisdictions treat bare-knuckle under existing combat sports law, some sanction it through equivalents of athletic commissions, and in the United Kingdom professional bare-knuckle has historically operated without the licensing structure that governs gloved boxing under the British Boxing Board of Control. A UK-based card and a Florida card can therefore run under meaningfully different medical and rule frameworks.

Why this matters for records and rankings

Because sanctioning is fragmented, there is no single authoritative record-keeper for bare-knuckle boxing comparable to boxing's sanctioning bodies. Fighter records are assembled from promotion websites and third-party databases, and they disagree. Any serious analysis has to state its own continuity rules — which promotions count, whether predecessor-brand bouts count, and whether unsanctioned fights count at all.

BKBX counts bouts fought under BKB and its predecessor brands toward a fighter's bare-knuckle record, tracks gloved boxing and MMA records separately, and excludes unsanctioned fights entirely.