Two belts, one date before the year ends
Aaron McKenna and Denzel Bentley have agreed to fight for the IBF and WBO middleweight titles in 2026, Sky Sports understands. No date, no venue, but the fight is on.
McKenna took the IBF belt last month with a points win over Etinosa Oliha in front of a home crowd in Dublin, extending a professional record that still carries no defeat. Bentley reached his title by a different road. He beat Endry Saavedra in April to become WBO interim champion, then was elevated to full champion in July when Janibek Alimkhanuly gave up the belt.
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McKenna wants the lot
He said so in the ring in Dublin, and he has repeated it since. He will fight anyone, he wants to unify, and he pointed back to the 1980s and 1990s as the era where the best simply fought each other instead of circling.
He gave the credit for that to the structure around him, arguing that Zuffa Boxing is already changing the sport because everybody in it is being matched with everybody else. Whether or not the promotional politics hold up, the outcome here is a champion taking the fight in front of him rather than a soft defence.
A division looking for a headline act
Middleweight has not had one since Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin were trading rounds, and McKenna is open about wanting to fill that gap. Before the Oliha fight he told Sky Sports he intended to clean out 160lb, go undisputed, and then keep climbing.
The plan he laid out runs a long way past Bentley. He is 6ft 3in with the reach to match, and a frame he believes will carry weight comfortably. Once 160lb is done, he wants 168, then 175, and he has said he intends to have at least one heavyweight fight before he finishes.
Bentley is a more immediate problem than any of that. The Londoner has been in these positions before and kept coming back, and he did not take the WBO belt off the shelf to hand it straight over.
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