When Jai Opetaia and Brandon Glanton touch gloves on March 8 at the Meta Apex in Las Vegas, the fight itself will almost certainly be one-sided. Opetaia is 29-0 with 23 knockouts, widely regarded as the best cruiserweight on the planet, and has stopped his last four opponents. Glanton is 21-3 and has never held a world title.
But what happens outside the ropes on March 8 matters more than what happens inside them. Zuffa Boxing 04 will crown the promotion’s first-ever champion, and the way it handles — or ignores — Opetaia’s existing IBF title will set the terms for boxing’s power struggle for years to come.
The Belt Nobody Mentioned
When Zuffa Boxing announced Opetaia vs. Glanton, the promotion listed only one title at stake: the inaugural Zuffa Boxing Cruiserweight World Championship. There was no mention of the IBF belt that Opetaia has held and defended since reclaiming it from Mairis Briedis in May 2024. No mention of The Ring Magazine title he has carried since 2022. The promotional poster featured one belt — Zuffa’s.
That omission was not accidental. Dana White has been explicit about his intentions. “I’m gonna get rid of the sanctioning organizations,” he told Stephen A. Smith in January. “The best will fight the best.” He later softened slightly — “It’s all a work in progress,” he said at a Zuffa Boxing press conference — but the direction has never been ambiguous. Zuffa wants its championship to stand on its own, independent of the WBC, WBA, IBF, and WBO.
The problem is that Zuffa’s flagship signing still holds an IBF belt and wants to keep it.
At a recent media scrum, Opetaia acknowledged the tension directly. “That’s my world title,” he said of the IBF belt. “I spoke to the IBF that is here today. I’m proud to hold that IBF belt. I’m willing to fight for it. I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes. I don’t understand the ins and outs that much. It becomes a bit of a sticky situation but I’m focused. I’ve got a job to do and I’ve got a fight to win.”
The unanswered questions are specific and consequential. Will the IBF require its mandatory second-day weigh-in, capping Opetaia at 214 pounds? Will an IBF inspector be permitted in the ring? Will the Paramount+ broadcast acknowledge the IBF title at all? Veteran journalist Dan Rafael has reported confidently that the IBF belt will be on the line, but as of this writing, neither Zuffa Boxing nor the IBF has officially confirmed that.
If the IBF insists on its standard protocols and Zuffa refuses to accommodate them, the sanctioning body faces an uncomfortable choice: look the other way, or strip its champion. Boxing has seen this movie before. In late 2025, the WBC stripped Terence Crawford for refusing to pay a $300,000 sanctioning fee after his victory over Canelo Álvarez. Crawford’s response on social media was blunt: “You can take the f—ing belt. It’s a trophy anyway.” If Opetaia loses his IBF title over a credentialing dispute at a Zuffa event, the belt’s symbolic authority takes another hit — and Zuffa’s argument that the sanctioning bodies are relics gains another data point.
The Fighter in the Middle
Opetaia did not sign with Zuffa Boxing to make a political statement. He signed because he spent three years trying to get unification fights and couldn’t make them happen under the traditional system. He went 3-0 in 2025, stopping David Nyika, Claudio Squeo, and Huseyin Cinkara, while the other cruiserweight champions — Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramírez (WBA and WBO) and Noël Mikaelian (WBC) — competed on different networks under different promoters with no structural incentive to meet him.
His manager, Mick Francis, has been direct about the calculus. “One of the concerns was they didn’t recognize the sanctioning bodies,” Francis told Boxing King Media. “However, probably to sweeten the deal and get Jai across the line is that they will let Jai fight for the titles and unify the division, which is exactly what he wants to do.”
White confirmed as much. “These guys all come from somewhere and had dreams from when they first put on a pair of gloves,” he said. “We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that these guys can do what they wanted to do.”
The contradiction is plain. Zuffa’s institutional position is that sanctioning bodies are unnecessary. Zuffa’s most important fighter needs those sanctioning bodies to achieve his career-defining goal. If Opetaia becomes undisputed — holding the IBF, WBA, WBO, WBC, Ring Magazine, and Zuffa belts simultaneously — it would validate both systems at once. If unification fights never materialize, Opetaia has said plainly what happens next. “If we don’t get one by the end of the year,” he told reporters, “I’ll be very f—ing disappointed.”
He turns 31 in June and has already floated a move to heavyweight. The window is not unlimited.
The Cruiserweight Landscape
The division around Opetaia is in motion. Ramírez is set to defend his WBA and WBO titles against David Benavidez on May 2 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. That fight will either produce a unified champion on the other side of the division or, if Benavidez wins, create a new obstacle between Opetaia and undisputed status — one fighting under Sampson Lewkowicz’s promotional banner, not Zuffa’s.
Mikaelian reclaimed the WBC title in December by avenging his loss to Badou Jack. He is the least prominent of the cruiserweight titleholders but controls a belt Opetaia would need.
None of these fighters are signed to Zuffa Boxing. Any unification fight would require cross-promotional negotiation — the exact kind of dealing that boxing’s fractured ecosystem has historically made difficult and that Zuffa’s closed-league model is philosophically designed to avoid.
The Bigger Picture
March 8 arrives at a specific legislative moment. The Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act (H.R. 4624) passed the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on January 21 by a vote of 30-4 and now awaits a full House floor vote. If enacted, the law would allow Unified Boxing Organizations to operate their own title and ranking systems outside the traditional sanctioning body framework — effectively giving legal sanction to exactly what Zuffa is already doing on a promotional level.
Supporters include Lonnie Ali, Muhammad Ali’s widow, who testified that it was time to allow another system to compete. Opponents include Oscar De La Hoya and Evander Holyfield, who warned in The Wall Street Journal that UBOs would allow a single company to control every part of a boxing league. Muhammad Ali’s grandson, Nico Ali Walsh — himself an active professional boxer — publicly opposes the bill bearing his grandfather’s name.
The WBC’s Mauricio Sulaimán has been the most vocal sanctioning body critic, comparing Zuffa to failed alternative football leagues and calling the promotion “minor league.” The IBF, by contrast, has been mostly silent — which is why March 8 is a pressure point. Silence works until your champion is fighting on someone else’s card for someone else’s belt, and you have to decide whether you’re in the building or not.
Zuffa Boxing has now held three events, announced plans for 12 to 16 cards in 2026, revealed its eight-division structure, and signed nearly 100 fighters. It has a $500 million Paramount+ deal, separately funded super-fights through Sela and Netflix, and the legislative momentum of a bipartisan bill moving through Congress with White House connections.
Against all of that, the IBF’s leverage on March 8 comes down to a credential, a weigh-in scale, and a question: does the belt matter enough for anyone in the room to fight for it? Not Opetaia — he’ll fight regardless. The sanctioning body itself. That answer will tell the sport more about boxing’s future than twelve rounds of cruiserweight action ever could.