Many of the most popular names in the sport are ready for a fight in the coming months and history could be made. The problem lurking behind the schedule, however, is the schedule itself.

Among the names waiting for fights are Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather and Keith Thurman, stars whose best years are long behind them. Lineal heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk is all but retired while the division irons itself out, and the biggest fight otherwise is between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, yesterday’s British heroes.

As is, those are the megafights and events of note. Fights between younger stars, such as potential Devin Haney-Shakur Stevenson and Vergil Ortiz-Jaron “Boots” Ennis bouts, fell apart. A shift in priorities appears to be toward banking on established stars rather than making new ones, at least when it comes to which fights are featured.

The schedule leaves boxing fans, and others, to wonder who the names of tomorrow might be.

Boxing tends to endure slow years and periodic lulls, and when that happens, variations of the “boxing is dead” declaration flood the media of the day. The sport is neither dead nor dying, though that’s usually where the discussion ends. The reality is that boxing’s health is more about whether or not it exists.

Long gone are the days when boxing guided or at least inspired technological advances like video and audio broadcasts, and dominated in print. Litigating how things became this way is pointless. The sport now follows the evolution of media consumption, as the proliferation of YouTube- and TikTok-minded media who rely more on content and reach than love for the sport.

Previous threats to boxing’s long-term health were all alleviated, in part, by a generous dose of new blood. When deep mafia involvement in the 1950s nearly tore the sport apart, a young Muhammad Ali and the heavyweights of the '60s and '70s reignited public interest. Scandals of the '70s and early '80s were met with promising U.S. Olympic boxing teams who turned pro, and even the old names from above on the current fight schedules were once fresh sacrifices to the fight gods in the decades that followed.

Despite being one of the oldest Olympic sports, boxing faced permanent expulsion due to nagging issues with its oversight and governing bodies that called into question their objectivity in the last decade or more. Improvements such as adjustments to the Olympic boxing scoring system and the inclusion of women’s boxing were nearly binned until the International Olympic Committee made an 11th-hour decision last year to allow boxers to participate in 2028.

Beyond that, the future of boxing at the Olympics is unclear at best, leaving young fighters without long-term goals as amateurs. Local amateur scenes all over the U.S. once featured the Golden Gloves, Silver Gloves, inter-city tournaments and more, and many of those have vanished. Most old dedicated boxing gyms became fitness clubs or franchise gyms as public interest waned. The atrophy of the local amateur scene is unfortunately contagious and spread to the pro game, where fight cities across the nation turned away decades ago.

The tale of boxing’s overall decline is a story of corruption, resistance to change and an upward shift of power leading to an outward diaspora of sponsorship and opportunities for entities not backed by a horde of investors. Anyone can still become a fighter, anyone can still become a fight promoter or manager, but expectations of success in boxing’s current landscape belong to an incredibly small, and likely shrinking, group of people.

To be clear, there are many worthwhile fights likely to be made and groups sustaining boxing’s future by developing stars. A thrilling showdown between Naoya Inoue and Jesse “Bam” Rodríguez is in the works, for example, and all-offense young(er) fighters David Benavidez and Daniel Dubois have several high-profile options.

The future is not automatically bleak, and especially not short-term. There will always be fights to watch. The concern is whether boxing will be able to produce young stars and propel a new generation forward with a fractured system.

Starting in the 1960s, the World Boxing Association and the World Boxing Council replaced boxing’s old main sanctioning organizations, the National Boxing Association and the New York State Athletic Commission. In the years that followed, the WBA and WBC feuded about mandatory challengers and time limits for defenses, eventually refusing to rank each other’s champions. Gradually disagreements transformed into sanctioning organizations openly working toward competing goals, to the point that some of the now four of them have multiple champions per division and do nothing to consolidate titles.

In contrast to the illusion of camaraderie among boxing media and fighters, there truly is no common goal in the sport right now. Even a potential update to the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act struggles against the controversy of corporate backing and questions about how it could be enforced. Boxing remains a sport of individual interests inside the ring and out.

Boxing isn’t learning from its own history as it leans on the strength of big but old names. Those fighters aren’t active anyway. What intensifies the issue is that most of the fighters just below those names, the A-tier fighters who don’t have the same name value, are also relatively inactive, fighting twice a year at most.

Better awareness of brain health and the dangers of fighting more mean that boxing not only cannot, but should not go back to a time of fighters competing multiple times a month. Social media content about fighters’ personal lives won’t carry the sport through, though. Ultimately fighters must fight, and there is as much incentive for fighters to operate on social media as in a ring, if not more.

If the goal is to simply stay alive, the current path is perfect. Growth will require something else, however, like putting finances and energy toward reassuring young fighters that success can actually be attained through hard work in the gym, and eventually the ring.

If there is to be a new generation of stars, the only way to entice them out from the shadow of other better-funded and less-dangerous sports is to acknowledge current problems and take measures to revamp parts of the system that need it. Future history depends on it. And right now the foundations of the sport, from the amateur to prospect levels, need their cracks sealed.