Willy Hutchinson beat Joshua Buatsi by unanimous decision at Manchester’s AO Arena on Saturday, November 7, 2026, to win the vacant WBC light-heavyweight title. Two years after Buatsi knocked him down twice and beat him on points at Wembley, the 28-year-old from Carstairs, Scotland, took the rematch on the cards and left with the belt he wrote down as a childhood goal.
FINAL: Willy Hutchinson def. Joshua Buatsi, unanimous decision (117-112, 115-113, 115-113)
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Hutchinson vs Buatsi Result: Movement Beat Pressure
The Hutchinson vs Buatsi result was built in the first half of the fight. The Ring’s ringside report had Hutchinson outboxing Buatsi over the 12 rounds, mixing his natural flair with a mature, poised approach, and the official scores of 117-112, 115-113 and 115-113 matched that reading. Hutchinson moved constantly, slipped the incoming work and caught Buatsi with looping counters, and by the third round he was confident enough to showboat, making Buatsi miss and paying him back with a clean right hand.
Buatsi, the business-like pressure fighter in this matchup, never found the hurtful shots that decided the first meeting. He fell short with body punches, reached with his jab and had to reset again and again as Hutchinson’s movement broke his rhythm. At the midway point the challenger turned champion elect was in clear control, dropping his hands, swaying away from Buatsi’s crudest work and answering with crisp combinations, including an accurate one in the seventh that underlined how far the fight had drifted from the Londoner.
Buatsi’s Late Rally Comes Too Late
The second half asked the only real question of Hutchinson’s night. Buatsi showed more urgency from the eighth on, closing the range and lashing in punches from head to body, and in the eleventh he finally committed to an all-out body assault that had Hutchinson wilting for the first time. Sky Sports’ report noted the same late surge, with Buatsi marching forward in the final round and landing downstairs.
It was not enough, because Hutchinson had banked too much and because, this time, he stayed on his feet. In 2024, knockdowns in the sixth and ninth rounds swung the fight to Buatsi. In Manchester there were no knockdowns at all. Hutchinson regathered himself after the eleventh, boxed on the back foot through the twelfth, content with his lead, and closed out the decision that moves him to 21-2 with 14 knockouts. Buatsi falls to 20-2 with 13 knockouts, and the second defeat of his professional career follows the points loss to Callum Smith in 2025.
The Rematch He Demanded In The Dressing Room
This fight was personal long before the WBC belt was attached to it. The two first met on September 21, 2024, on the undercard of Daniel Dubois against Anthony Joshua at Wembley Stadium, where Buatsi dropped Hutchinson twice and won a split decision for the WBO interim title. Hutchinson went to Buatsi’s dressing room that night and asked for the rematch on the spot. As he recalled it at Thursday’s final press conference: “I said to him, I want a rematch. I said, I’m telling you, I’ll get you. And here I am.”
The roads back explain the shift in the result. Hutchinson rebuilt with a stoppage of Mark Jeffers and a 10-round decision over Ezra Taylor, arriving in Manchester unbeaten since Wembley and boxing with patience he did not have at 26. Buatsi lost his WBO interim title in a brutal 12-round war with Callum Smith, then came through a close majority decision over Zach Parker that many ringsiders scored the other way. The rematch had also been upgraded on paper: first set for the interim belt, it became a fight for the full vacant title after David Benavidez vacated the WBC championship to campaign at cruiserweight, a change the sanctioning body confirmed in late October. Hutchinson, who wrote in a book at age 13 that he would become WBC champion and still keeps that book, had already completed the hardest part of the script as an amateur, becoming the first Scottish boxer to win gold at an amateur world championships.
What The Belt Sets Up At 175 Pounds
The title picture around Hutchinson is crowded and lucrative. The weigh-in had set the tone on Friday, when Buatsi needed a second attempt after initially coming in an ounce over the 175-pound limit before recording 174.9 pounds, with Hutchinson at 174.5. Now the winner holds the WBC seat in a division where Callum Smith, the man who beat Buatsi last year, sits near the top of the rankings, and where Anthony Yarde was watching from ringside in Manchester. Sky Sports noted Yarde, long linked to a domestic fight with Buatsi, could now switch his sights to the new champion instead.
For Buatsi, 33, an Olympic bronze medallist at Rio 2016, this was his first full world title fight, and losing it leaves his route back longer and harder. For Hutchinson, the first defence and the unification conversation start immediately, and both run through British names the home crowd already knows. On Saturday night in Manchester, though, the story was simpler: the man who was dropped twice and beaten in the first fight came back, boxed the cleaner fight, took the decision on all three cards, and walked out as the WBC light-heavyweight champion of the world.
