FIVE BRITISH STARS OF 2026 SO FAR
We’re over halfway through the calendar year and with a huge five months for the sport approaching, where we look likely to see some of the biggest fights in the history of the sport, we’ve taken a look at the British stars of 2026 so far.
Ryan Garner
After a quiet end to 2025, Southampton’s super-featherweight star Ryan Garner made a successful return to the ring back in March with a third-round TKO of Cristian Bielma.
Then, in the biggest fight of his career to date, he claimed the WBC World ‘Interim’ Super-Featherweight Title with a comfortable points victory over the experienced Italian Michael Magnesi, whose two defeats up until the third loss of his career to Garner had come at the very highest level.
Now 20-0 with half of those victories coming inside the distance, Garner now finds himself in pole position for a crack at the full WBC champ O’Shaquie Foster in what would be a more than winnable fight for him and would pretty much guarantee a career-high payday.
IF he doesn’t get a shot at the full world title, there are some cracking domestic fights he could find himself in towards the end of the year.
Leigh Wood is currently ranked in the top 15 in the WBC and that fight would be a perfect clash to end up on the Queensberry vs Matchroom 7vs7.
Either way, if he does fight again before the end of the year, he’s going to be in a big and exciting fight.
Ben Whittaker
Even though he’s not fought the level of opposition as some of the others on this list, what the Olympic silver medalist has done so far in 2026 has been epic.
First off in April, he took on the game Argentine Braian Suarez. In a fight which was a step up for Whittaker, he did what the likes of Lyndon Arthur and Sharabutdin Ataev couldn’t do and matched what Albert Ramirez did by stopping Suarez inside of a round.
Then, on his highly anticipated US debut in June, he was matched up with the twice-beaten Richard Rivera. A man who’s two career defeats as a professional so far could quite easily have been wins including a narrow defeat to world champion Badou Jack, Whittaker proved far too quick and powerful for him securing the second-round stoppage.
Again, this is opposition that someone of Whittaker’s calibre should be beating but it’s the way in which he has done it. He’s hardly broken a sweat and now with Andy Lee, he’s sitting down on his punches and showing just how powerful he is instead of boxing off the back foot and looking pretty.
He’s set to headline a big show in Birmingham in October in what will be the biggest step up of his career and then if he makes light work of that opponent, we may even see him out before the start of 2027.
He’s ranked in the top 10 of the IBF, WBC, WBO & Ring Magazine rankings so if he is victorious in October, don’t be surprised to see him fight for a world title before the end of the year if not the first quarter of next year.
We could well be seeing the future superstar of British boxing right here.
Zak Chelli
Probably a fighter that no one expected to appear on this list at the start of the year, the former British champion produced arguably the upset of the year not just in the UK but in the world back in May.
After former super-middleweight world champ David Morrell’s fight with Callum Smith was postponed due to an injury to Mundo, a fight with Chelli on the Wardley vs Dubois undercard was made at fairly short notice in what on paper was just a ‘keep busy’ sort of fight for the Cuban.
Keep busy he certainly was but with a completely different outcome to what most people predicted.
Down on the cards with one round remaining, Chelli needed a big KO and that’s exactly what he got as he rocked Morrell to his boots and did what David Benavidez couldn’t do and stop Morrell Jr.
The win now puts Chelli’s name into the hat in a STACKED light-heavyweight division both domestically and globally and you probably won’t get many people writing him off once again.
Dalton Smith
It was a memorable start to the year for British boxing with a new world champion crowned in just the first 10 days of the new calendar year.
The man who did the business was Sheffield’s own Dalton Smith.
Sent over to New York to challenge the dynamite-fisted Puerto Rican Subriel Matias for the WBC World Super-Lightweight Title, many believed that Smith was going to have to box his way to victory over the 12-round distance and pray that the judges didn’t get up to any funny business.
Probably with that in the back of his mind, Smith ripped up the script completely as he did the unthinkable and took the fight to Matias to claim an emphatic fifth-round stoppage.
It was very much Fury vs Wilder 2 esque.
He was set to make the first defence of his world title against Alberto Puello early last month but he was forced to withdraw due to injury.
That fight is now touted to take place in the Autumn and if Dalt gets past Puello which we expect him to do so, it sets him up nicely for a potential unification clash with Shakur Stevenson next year OR if Adam Azim can get his hands on a world title, an all-British unification with his arch-rival from down the M1 via the M25.
Josh Kelly
Just three weeks after Dalton’s memorable victory across the pond, former Olympian Josh Kelly joined the British world champions club with by a distance the biggest win of his career.
Like Smith, Kelly was up against a ferocious puncher in Russia’s reigning IBF world champ Bakhram Murtazaliev but that didn’t faze Kelly as he boxed his way to a majority-decision victory.
It was a disciplined performance from Kelly against arguably one of the most avoided champions in the sport.
After seeing what he did to Jack Culcay and Tim Tszyu, no one wanted to touch Murtazaliev with a barge pole but Kelly took the risk and reaped the reward.
He’s now set to make the first defence of his IBF World Super-Welterweight Title against Northern Ireland’s Caoimhin Agyarko on the Joshua vs Prenga undercard later this month and if he gets through that, he’s in pole position for a crack at his stablemate Jaron Ennis for the IBF & WBO world titles.
What a fight that would be.