The Profile
The fighter beyond the highlight reel.
Ricky Hatton was a Manchester fighter in a way that nobody before or since has quite managed to be. His fights in Manchester drew fifty thousand travelling fans. His fight in Las Vegas against Floyd Mayweather drew something like thirty thousand British supporters who flew out, filled the hotels, turned the city blue, and gave Vegas an education in what a British sporting following actually looks like.
He was a genuinely world class body puncher with a boxing IQ that his opponents frequently underestimated because he carried himself like a Hyde lad who had wandered into the wrong room. The body shots alone against Jose Luis Castillo would be enough to put him in any serious top ten of British fighters. The win over Kostya Tszyu to take the IBF light welterweight title in 2005 was one of the best performances by a British fighter in the modern era.
Since retiring, he has trained fighters at his Hyde gym, made a well-publicised comeback in 2012, and been genuinely open about the mental health struggles that followed him out of the ring. That openness has done real good. He has also been one of the most sought-after after-dinner speakers in British sport, and it is not hard to see why. He is honest, funny, and relentlessly self-deprecating.
You do not meet many people who can headline a speaker lunch in EC3 and walk out with the entire room feeling like they made a new friend. Hatton does it routinely.
“Twenty five thousand people came out to Las Vegas with me. Someone else was supposed to be the star. I was just the lad from Hyde.”
Career highlights
- IBF light welterweight champion, 2005
- WBA welterweight champion, 2006
- The Ring magazine Fighter of the Year, 2005
- Famous victory over Kostya Tszyu, June 2005
- MBE for services to boxing
First hand
Ricky Hatton at Steam
Ricky spoke at Steam in May 2025 and the room did not want him to leave. He did a full Q and A session that overran by half an hour because nobody wanted to stop asking questions.