When Muhammad Waseem stopped Venezuela’s Wiston Orono in the ninth round in Quetta on May 10, 2025, to win Pakistan’s first professional boxing world title, the achievement briefly gained mainstream coverage in Pakistani sports. Dawn ran the story. The Express Tribune covered it. GEO Sports reported on the WBA Gold bantamweight title win. For a few days, Pakistani boxing occupied space in the national sports conversation that it almost never does.
Then the coverage subsided. Within a week, the front pages and broadcast segments had returned to cricket. Pakistan’s T20 and ODI schedules, PSL franchise news, and commentary on batting form filled the space that Waseem’s historic win had momentarily occupied. This is not a media failure in any simple sense — it is the operation of a system that has developed clear incentive structures over decades, and boxing does not fit those structures in ways that would change the outcome without deliberate intervention.
Cricket’s Structural Dominance
The Express Tribune recently reported that Pakistan’s sports system is under severe strain across most disciplines, with squash, boxing, wrestling, and athletics in decline, and that cricket continues to receive an overwhelming share of attention, sponsorships, and resources, while other sports remain marginalized. This is not a recent development. Cricket’s media dominance in Pakistan has been building since the country’s 1992 World Cup win under Imran Khan and has accelerated with the launch of the PSL in 2016, which created a domestic franchise competition with broadcast rights, celebrity ownership, and international player participation capable of generating sustained news cycles.
The economic logic driving this dynamic is straightforward. Broadcast rights for Pakistan Cricket Board events generate revenue that justifies investment. Advertisers pay premiums to reach cricket audiences because they are large, demographically diverse, and demonstrably willing to consume cricket content in large volumes. Editorial decisions at television networks and newspapers are driven by advertising revenue. Sports desks allocate correspondent time and column inches based on what generates reader and viewer engagement. Cricket generates engagement. Boxing does not exist not because Pakistani boxing fans do not exist, but because boxing has never had the institutional infrastructure, broadcast relationships, or a consistent competitive calendar that would allow a fan base to develop at scale.
The feedback loop is self-reinforcing: no broadcast coverage means no mass audience, no mass audience means no advertising interest, no advertising interest means no broadcast investment, no broadcast investment means continued absence. Breaking this loop requires a disruption on one side of the cycle — either a broadcaster willing to invest in boxing before the audience is established, a major international event that forces coverage regardless of prior audience size, or a fighter whose individual profile is large enough to generate media interest independent of the sport’s institutional standing.
What Waseem’s 2025 Title Win Demonstrated
The May 2025 fight in Quetta demonstrated both possibilities and limits. The event attracted international attention from the WBA, generated government and military backing from the Balochistan government and the Pakistan Army, and produced a genuine world title bout that gave mainstream outlets a reason to cover boxing beyond the sport’s regular offerings. Waseem’s profile — built over a decade of professional fighting, two IBF title challenges, and the Fight for Glory events he organized — was large enough that a world title win could not be ignored.
The coverage that followed was reactive and episodic rather than sustained and structural. There were no follow-up profiles of the other Pakistani fighters on the card. No television network announced a boxing broadcasting deal inspired by the event. No corporate sponsor publicly committed to supporting Pakistani boxing development in the wake of the title win. The fight created a news moment; it did not create a media infrastructure. Those are distinct, and Pakistani boxing requires the second.
Regional Boxing’s Permanent Invisibility
For fighters who compete below Waseem’s level — the regional card boxers, the interdepartmental championship competitors, the developing professionals on the main cards of Defence Day Fight Night — media invisibility is not occasional. It is the baseline condition of their careers.
A fighter like Muhammad Rehan Azhar, competing in Quetta at a marquee regional event in September 2021, generated no national media coverage for his appearance on the Defence Day Fight Night main card. The result — a first-round knockout loss to Taimoor Khan — did not appear in Dawn, the Tribune, or GEO Sports. Local Quetta newspapers may have printed brief event summaries. The fight appeared as a data point on Tapology and as a Reddit thread in which fans sought information about Azhar’s current status months later. That thread, from r/PakSports, became one of the primary sources documenting Azhar’s career trajectory — a community post replacing the institutional sports journalism that does not exist for fighters at his level.
This invisibility has compounding consequences that go beyond individual fighters’ inability to attract sponsors. A sport that receives no coverage cannot build the casual fan base that sustains it economically. Parents who never see boxing on television or read about boxing results in newspapers do not point their athletic children toward boxing gyms. Young fighters who never see their bouts covered have no evidence that the sport can provide anything beyond the intrinsic rewards of competition. Coaches and gym operators who lack media presence struggle to secure institutional attention and funding to improve their facilities.
Social Media’s Partial Substitute
The gap left by mainstream media has been partially filled by social media, but only partially. Fighters, gyms, and boxing organizations in Pakistan use Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube to document events, share results, and maintain some public presence. The Balochistan Boxing Academy posts training videos. Individual fighters post bout announcements and results. Taimoor Khan built a meaningful social media following, which contributed to his ability to attract promotional attention and ultimately secure a WBC Asia heavyweight title fight in 2023.
Social media presence, however, is not equivalent to journalism. It is self-promotion rather than independent coverage, meaning it reaches existing followers rather than expanding the audience. It cannot provide the credibility that editorial media coverage confers, the historical documentation that journalism provides, or the accountability that independent reporting creates around institutional decisions. When the Pakistan Boxing Federation declines to nominate a fighter for an international program, social media does not investigate or report on that decision as a dedicated boxing correspondent would. When a regional card produces a mismatch that damages a developing fighter’s career, no one with institutional media standing analyzes the causes.
The absence of boxing journalism in Pakistan is not simply about column inches. It concerns the removal of a feedback mechanism that would otherwise foster accountability among the sport’s decision-makers, visibility for its participants, and knowledge infrastructure for its fans. Until boxing generates sufficient media coverage to sustain dedicated coverage—or until dedicated coverage is invested in as a means of building that footprint—the sport will continue to operate in an informational vacuum that limits everything else it is trying to build.
