The unbeaten five-division champion won’t start with Kaye Scott, her 42-year-old opponent Saturday night in a 10-round main event DAZN will stream worldwide from State Farm Arena in Atlanta (8:30 p.m. ET; 1:30 a.m. BST). Shields is a 20-1 favorite to beat the Australian champion in their fight for Scott’s WBA and WBC middleweight titles, two of the championships Shields held before she moved up to the women’s heavyweight limit of 175 pounds two years ago.

While she expressed respect for Scott, Shields acknowledged that dropping down to the 160-pound division again is about more significant fights than this, namely a showdown with undefeated unified welterweight champ Lauren Price. Shields, 31, is ranked No. 2 on The Ring’s pound-for-pound list, whereas the 32-year-old Price occupies the No. 8 spot.

“Everybody knows that Claressa Shields is f****** unbeatable,” Shields told The Ring. “Like, we know that. I’m going down here to make the best fights. And I was very clear with my team that I was not going down to 160 if there were no belts on the line.

“So, I’m looking forward to getting them belts and then, yes, me versus Lauren Price at 160. She’s an Olympic gold medalist; I’m a two-time Olympic gold medalist. I don’t think in our sport of boxing we’ve ever had two women who were Olympic champions fight against each other, so I look forward to fighting her.”

Shields’ handlers have invited Price to sit ringside Saturday night. Regardless of whether Price takes a transatlantic trip to see Shields (18-0, 3 KOs) box Scott (5-1-1) in person, Dmitriy Salita, Shields’ longtime promoter, believes he and Boxxer’s Ben Shalom – whose company promotes Price – have the framework for a deal in place for Shields and Price to square off sometime early in 2027 at a venue to be determined in the United States.

Price (10-0, 2 KOs) – who owns The Ring, IBF, WBA and WBC 147-pound crowns – is expected to take a tuneup fight sometime early in the fall.

Shields respects Price’s ambition, but the Flint, Michigan native doesn’t think the Welsh southpaw has what it would take to dethrone the self-professed “GWOAT.”

“I think that she’s very crafty,” Shields said. “She’s very strong, she’s explosive. She’s very determined, but she also has flaws that I’ve seen. And when I heard her say she would fight me, I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ I’ve had plenty of girls say that they would fight me, and from all different weight classes. But when I went to the UK and pulled up there and she was face-to-face with me in the ring [April 4], she was like, ‘I think I can beat you in a fight,’ and that she looks forward to fighting me. I was like, ‘Oh, all right. Cool.’

“She was serious about it. It wasn’t just talk because, you know, talk is cheap. It was like she really wants to test herself and she thinks that she can beat me. And I said, ‘Well, if the weight class makes sense,’ and she said, ‘We can do it at 160.’ And I said, ‘Perfect, because you won the Olympics at 165, I won the Olympics at 165, so let’s make it happen.’ And she was like, ‘OK,’ so that’s why we’re here now.”