The Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act offers the worst of both boxing and MMA
The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote on the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act today, March 24, and barring something unexpected, it will pass. From there it goes to the Senate, and if supporters are correct, it will not be long before it reaches President Donald Trump's desk. The bill's backers frame it as a much-needed modernization of boxing regulation, one that will give boxers more choices and better protections. That framing deserves scrutiny.
The bill creates a new category of entity called a Unified Boxing Organization, or UBO — a structure that allows a single company to sign fighters, promote their bouts, award championship titles and control rankings, all without relying on an independent sanctioning organization. In practice, this is the UFC model. And the company that lobbied for this legislation, drafted it, and has already launched its boxing operation in anticipation of it, is TKO Group Holdings — the UFC's parent company, whose CEO has publicly cultivated a relationship with President Trump that most Washington observers would describe as unusually close.
Pat English, a lead drafter of the original Ali Act, was more direct in his written testimony to the committee: The bill "was substantially drafted by lobbyists" for Zuffa and its various subdivisions, he wrote. When John McCain and his staff drafted the original Acts in 1999, English wrote, "there was no agenda but one. That agenda was to make boxing better, safer, and more fair to boxers. There was no intent at all to favor any single promotional entity. That is not the case here."
There is also a truth-in-labeling problem worth noting at the outset. Supporters of this legislation have repeatedly claimed that the Ali Act is not being amended — only the Professional Boxing Safety Act. English addresses this directly: They are one and the same series of federal laws. The Professional Boxing Safety Act came first in 1996 and was amended by the Muhammad Ali Act. To market the bill as anything other than an amendment to the Ali Act is, as English puts it, simply false — and "if the proposed amendment is being billed untruthfully, it calls into question the honesty of those who are pushing for it."
Boxing has always had a monopoly problem. The Ali Act was built to solve it
To understand what this bill does wrong, you have to understand what it is undoing — and why those protections were put in place to begin with.
Congressional interest in boxing's monopoly problem goes back to 1960, when Senator Estes Kefauver convened the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly to investigate what he described as a "continuing conspiracy between underworld elements and licensed promoters, matchmakers, and managers to exclude competition and maintain monopoly control over major boxing contests." Those hearings were prompted directly by the Department of Justice's successful antitrust suit against the International Boxing Club of New York (the IBC), which had achieved near-complete control over championship boxing by buying out rivals, securing exclusive leases on key arenas and locking top contenders into exclusive contracts lasting three to five years. The Supreme Court affirmed that the IBC had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The mechanism the IBC used to build and maintain that monopoly was simple, and it outlasted the IBC itself: The option contract. If a promoter controls the champion and you want a title shot, you sign away your next several fights to that promoter. Win or lose, the promoter retains control of the championship. Win and you're bound to him for years. Lose and you have nothing. As Cus D'Amato, one of the most respected figures in boxing history, testified to Congress, option contracts were "legalized extortion" that reduced fighters to "indentured servants." Or as promoter Tony Holden testified to Congress in 1999: "The word 'options' is what keeps this monopoly alive."
The Ali Act was not, as TKO told the committee in its written answers, designed to address boxing's "fragmentation." The original bill's first legislative finding — that boxing "operates without any private sector association, league, or centralized industry organization" — was a diagnosis, not a prescription. It was Congress explaining why the problems it was about to address existed, not calling for a monopoly to be created. The rest of the legislative record makes the intent unmistakable. The Senate Report accompanying the original Act identified coercive promotional contracts as "the key contracting practice that has been used by promoters to gain undue control over boxers and championship titles, to the clear detriment of the sport," practices that "enabled a single promoter to achieve a monopoly on a substantial portion of championship-level competition in that particular weight division." The Act's purpose, as stated in the legislation itself, was to "protect professional boxers against certain exploitive, oppressive, and unethical business practices" and to "promote honorable competition in the professional boxing industry." When the Act uses phrases like "anti-competitive business practices" and "restraints of interstate trade," it is not using those words loosely. It is invoking antitrust — deliberately, because that is the legal tradition the legislation emerged from.
The three protections the bill removes
Bob Arum — a former Assistant U.S. Attorney under Robert F. Kennedy who has promoted boxing with Top Rank for six decades — submitted a letter to the committee identifying precisely what the new Revival Act removes from fighters who sign with a UBO. His analysis is exact: "A UBO is not prohibited from entering coercive contracts with fighters, is not required to provide financial disclosures to fighters, and is not subject to the rule establishing a firewall between managers and promoters."
These are not incidental omissions. They are the three structural pillars of the original Ali Act, each one built from decades of documented abuse. Under the proposed "UBO compliance pathway," a new organization is deemed compliant if it meets basic safety standards, but it is conspicuously exempt from the core economic protections of the original law. By skipping these requirements, UBOs are no longer prohibited from entering into coercive contracts, are not required to provide financial disclosures to their fighters, and are not subject to the mandatory firewall between managers and promoters. English, a lead drafter of the original Ali Act and counsel to the Association of Boxing Commissions (ABC), has called this a "betrayal" of the work done by Senator McCain and his colleagues. He argues the bill is designed for a single purpose: To allow the new Zuffa boxing entity to avoid the very restrictions the original Ali Act created to protect fighters from exploitation.
On coercive contracts: Under the Ali Act, any provision conditioning a fighter's participation on the grant of future promotional rights is declared "in restraint of trade, contrary to public policy, and unenforceable," and is capped at 12 months. Under the Revival Act, a UBO can go back to the practice of demanding long-term exclusive rights in exchange for the opportunity a boxer had rightly earned in the ring. The No. 1 contender would not be guaranteed a chance to fight for the championship; instead their opportunity would be contingent on whether or not they accepted a UBO’s demands, signing away their rights for as long as six years.
A UBO would be permitted to require a six-year contract as price of entry into its system — longer than what California and New York permit under state law, longer than what industry witnesses described under oath as reasonable, and longer than what the Senate Report treated as an entire boxing career. The near-elimination of coercive options in American boxing since 2000 is one of the original Act's genuine achievements, built almost entirely on the private right of action it gave fighters to challenge violations in court. The Revival Act discards all of that for UBO fighters.
On financial disclosures: The Ali Act requires promoters to disclose all sources of income connected to a bout — broadcast fees, gate revenue, sponsorship — to any fighter in a 10-round or longer match. This provision emerged from decades of testimony about fighters negotiating purses blind while promoters pocketed multiples of what the fighters were told the fight was worth. In 2016, former world title challenger Chris Algieri invoked this provision to challenge his promoter's purse split, asking: "Without me, he doesn't make a dollar. So yes, I think it's totally fair and totally in my right to know what he's making off of my fight."
Under the Revival Act, UBO fighters have no such right. TKO representative Lawrence Epstein told the committee the original Act's disclosure framework was "simply ill-suited to a UBO structure" because of multi-year media deals — which is precisely the scenario the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), in its post-passage analysis, said warranted more disclosure, not less. The financial disclosure requirement is a major structural reason why boxers earn a far higher share of revenues than UFC fighters do. Remove it, and the leverage shifts from the fighter to the promoter overnight.
On the manager-promoter firewall: The Ali Act made it unlawful for a promoter to have a financial interest in the management of a boxer, or for a manager to receive compensation from a promoter outside the boxer's own contract. It applies to bouts of 10 rounds or more — deliberately focused on the top of the sport, where the leverage to coerce is greatest.
Under the Revival Act, a UBO can simultaneously act as promoter, sanctioning body, and effectively as the entity that shapes a fighter's career path. There is no independent check. The fighter's only advocate is the entity that profits from paying them as little as possible.
The model they are importing has already failed antitrust scrutiny
The UFC model — one entity controlling promotion, title belts, rankings and fighter contracts — is not an untested abstraction. It has been litigated. In Le et al. v. Zuffa, LLC, a class of more than 1,100 MMA fighters alleged that the UFC used long-term contracts with automatic extension clauses, exclusivity provisions, and control over title access to suppress fighter wages below competitive market rates. After a decade of litigation, the case settled for $ 375 million. TKO admitted no liability, but the Court's Class Certification Order found sufficient evidence that Zuffa wielded monopsony power over elite MMA fighters through exclusionary contracts, coercive tactics and rival acquisitions that suppressed fighter compensation below competitive levels.
As economist Andrew Zimbalist explained in his expert report in that case, the UFC's structural advantage over boxing promoters comes directly from the absence of independent sanctioning bodies: "Boxing promoters have less leverage than Zuffa has to coerce athletes into signing long-term exclusionary contracts in exchange for a shot at a title fight." The competitive market that boxing's fragmented structure produces — imperfect as it is — generates higher median fighter pay, a larger share of revenues to athletes, and more genuine competition for talent than exists in MMA. The Revival Act would import the structural conditions that produced the UFC's antitrust litigation into boxing, and grant them federal statutory legitimacy.
Lou DiBella, a veteran boxing promoter, was asked during his deposition in the UFC antitrust case whether a single entity controlling titles and rankings would increase its control over fighters. His answer: "The entity — you would have total control. The entity paying the fighter would be the one determining who the champion is, determining who the challengers would be and basically, would put it into a near total control over the fighter." That is not a warning about some hypothetical future. It is a description of how the UFC already works — and what the Revival Act would now authorize in boxing.
Congress had better options. It chose not to use them
The Ali Act's weaknesses have been understood since shortly after its passage. The GAO conducted a post-passage analysis that identified exactly where the law fell short. Senate hearings in 2002 produced a comprehensive record of proposals to fix it, many of which were incorporated into the Professional Boxing Amendments Act — introduced multiple times by Senators McCain and Byron Dorgan between 2002 and 2012.
That bill would have created a federal boxing commission with the power to license promoters, managers, and sanctioning organizations, conduct investigations, and revoke licenses for misconduct. It would have required sanctioning organizations to follow the ABC's objective rating criteria rather than merely being encouraged to. It would have mandated contractual minimums rather than leaving them as guidelines. It would have addressed venue shopping by creating consistent federal standards that state commissions could not undercut.
The Professional Boxing Amendments Act failed, in part because it was opposed by state athletic commissions that did not want to cede authority to a federal body. It was also lobbied against aggressively by Zuffa — the same company now behind the Revival Act — beginning in 2007, as the UFC started generating significant revenues. Zuffa's concern, stated at the time, was that federal oversight of boxing might eventually extend to MMA. Its actual interest was in ensuring that no federal framework existed that could constrain how a dominant promoter operates in a combat sports market.
That same company is now asking Congress not to strengthen the Ali Act's protections, but to exempt its boxing operation from the protections that already exist.
The congressional record contains decades of proposals for what real boxing reform looks like: Objective mandatory ratings criteria with genuine enforcement mechanisms; standardized model contracts with mandated minimums; financial surety bonds to guarantee fighter purses; expanded disclosure requirements; an independent national rating panel; a boxer pension system funded by sanctioning fees. None of those proposals appear in this bill.
What the bill does include is a new legal structure that allows TKO to do in boxing what the UFC does in MMA, while bypassing the specific provisions of federal law written to prevent exactly that.
What the committee process revealed
The bill's committee process was not a model of legislative diligence. One hearing was held — on Dec. 4, 2025 — before the bill was voted out of committee 30-4 on Jan. 21, 2026, and rushed to the House floor before TKO's written answers to Democratic members' questions had even been received.
Those questions, posed by Representative Ilhan Omar, were pointed. She asked how rankings and title shots would be determined within a Zuffa Boxing UBO, whether any independent body would have authority to review ranking decisions, and which specific contract clauses from the UFC's antitrust cases TKO intended to use in its boxing contracts. On the ranking question, Epstein's answer was that rankings would be done by a panel of media participants — selected by the UBO — with no independent oversight. On the contract question, his answer was a refusal to comment due to pending litigation. On whether TKO needed the legislation at all, his answer was revealing: "Whether or not legislation that expressly allows for the creation of UBOs is enacted, TKO has launched Zuffa Boxing within the current legal framework." Congress is being asked to retroactively legitimize what TKO is already doing and, in doing so, to immunize it from the Ali Act provisions that would otherwise apply.
The committee's Democratic members also flagged a provision in the original bill that illustrated how little substantive research preceded its drafting. The initial version included a mandatory random drug-testing requirement for all professional boxing cards — not just UBO events. Had that provision remained, it would have imposed costs that small club show promoters simply cannot absorb. Club shows operate on margins that barely cover the cost of fighters and venue rental. The drug-testing provision would have made most of them economically impossible, effectively clearing the field for well-capitalized entities like Zuffa Boxing at the expense of the grassroots infrastructure that develops virtually every professional fighter in the country. The provision was removed before the final vote — but only after that fact was pointed out. It was not anticipated. The committee did not know enough about how boxing actually works to foresee it.
That same lack of familiarity is visible in the six-year contract cap that Representative Omar's amendment added as a supposed fighter protection. During congressional hearings in the 1990s, industry participants described five-year contracts as encompassing a fighter's entire boxing career. The WBC's Jose Sulaiman testified during the original Ali Act hearings that three years is a reasonable maximum, noting that five years is too long unless the additional years are solely at the boxer's discretion. The committee's own notes from the original Ali Act hearings show witness after witness arguing for two- or three-year limits. The Revival Act's "protection" sets the maximum at six years — longer than what critics of the old exploitative system ever considered acceptable.
What real reform would have looked like
Genuine reform of the Ali Act would not be difficult to design. The congressional record already contains the blueprint. Require objective rating criteria for sanctioning organizations with actual enforcement mechanisms and real consequences for manipulation. Mandate the contractual minimums the ABC drafted as guidelines but was never empowered to enforce. Require financial surety bonds so fighters are guaranteed their purses. Expand financial disclosure requirements rather than contract them. Create an independent national rating panel drawn from boxing journalists rather than from the financial interests of sanctioning bodies or promoters. Establish a boxer pension system funded by championship sanctioning fees. Strengthen the private right of action that has been the most effective enforcement tool the Ali Act has produced.
None of that is in this bill.
What is in this bill is a new legal entity that combines the structural conditions that produced 50 years of monopoly abuse in boxing with the structural conditions that produced a $ 375 million antitrust settlement in MMA — and calls it progress.
The Ali Act was not perfect. It never was. But it represented a hard-won recognition that boxing's market, left to itself, moves toward monopoly, and that the fighters at the top of the sport need structural protections to have any genuine leverage and to prevent concentration in their industry. Those protections took four decades of congressional fact-finding to produce.
This bill removes the most important ones in a single vote, for the benefit of a company with the right political connections at the right political moment. Instead it offers boxers a choice between continuing with the corrupt system we currently have in boxing or signing on to a model that has led to monopolization and the exploitation of MMA fighters.
