Ramla Ali beat Mikiah Kreps by split decision on Sunday, November 8, 2026, at College Park Center in Arlington, Texas, to win the vacant WBO and IBF super-bantamweight world titles, the first world championship of her career. Two judges scored the 10-round fight for Ali and one scored it wide for Kreps, handing the previously unbeaten American the first defeat of her career in the co-main event of Most Valuable Promotions’ MVPW-07 card, as the BBC’s ringside report records.
FINAL: Ramla Ali 97-92, 96-93, Mikiah Kreps 98-91
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Event: MVPW-07, Sunday, November 8, 2026, at College Park Center, Arlington, Texas
TV: ESPN
Method: Split decision, 10 rounds; Ali scored the fight’s only knockdown in round three
A Third-Round Knockdown Splits The Cards
The fight turned in the third round. Ali caught Kreps with a hook that put her glove on the canvas for the only knockdown of the night, a 10-8 round that became the margin on both winning cards. Combat Sports UK’s report reads the cards the same way: 97-92 and 96-93 for Ali, with the third judge filing a wide 98-91 for Kreps.
Kreps made the result contentious the honest way, by outworking the new champion. Fighting out of Niagara Falls, New York, she pressed from the middle rounds on and outlanded Ali 115 punches to 78, including 91 power shots to 70, and she landed more in eight of the ten rounds. What she could not erase was the knockdown and Ali’s cleaner work early, built behind the jab while Kreps was still walking in. When the scores were read, Ali fell to her knees in tears on the canvas.
The Long Road To A First World Title
This was Ali’s second shot at a world title, and it arrived a decade into a story that started far from any ring. Born in Somalia, she fled the civil war with her family as a child and settled in London as a refugee. She went on to become the first Somali boxer to compete at an Olympic Games, representing Somalia at Tokyo 2020, and the first Muslim woman to win an English title as an amateur.
The professional road had its own setbacks. In 2024 she challenged WBC champion Yamileth Mercado and was swept aside in her first world title attempt, and she had been knocked out in her ninth professional fight in 2023. Sunday’s win, in a fight where she was outlanded and had to survive a strong finish from a younger, unbeaten opponent, is the result the whole career was pointed at. She dedicated it to her father, who died in May. “I can’t put into words what this means to me and what this means to all of Somalia,” she said after the decision.
Two Belts, And A Unification Door Opens
The WBO and IBF titles were vacant because Ellie Scotney, who had held both, moved up to featherweight. Ali now holds two of the four major belts at 122 pounds, and a third was defended on the same card: Skye Nicolson kept the WBC super-bantamweight title with a unanimous decision over Miyo Yoshida in Arlington, which makes an Ali and Nicolson unification the obvious next fight in the division. Ali improves to 12-2 with three knockouts. Kreps falls to 11-1, also with three knockouts, beaten for the first time by a former sparring partner.
Alycia Baumgardner topped the MVPW-07 bill, taking the IBF lightweight title from Elif Nur Turhan on scores of 100-90 on all three cards to become a two-division world champion. On a night built around women’s title fights, though, the lasting image was the co-main event: a 36-year-old who arrived in London as a refugee child, lost her first world title fight, and came back to leave Texas with two belts, a split decision, and the night she had chased for ten years.
