BKFC 94 wrap: Till survives Romero in front of a sold-out Manchester crowd, and a Bolton boxer shocks the middleweight division in sudden death

Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship’s biggest bet on the British market paid out in full on Saturday night. BKFC 94 drew a sold-out 15,894 to Manchester’s AO Arena, a figure president David Feldman confirmed as the venue’s largest of 2026, and the card underneath the number delivered a main event with a genuine scare in it and a title change nobody saw coming.

Darren Till beat Yoel Romero by unanimous decision, 49-46 on all three cards, and the sweep undersells how close the thing ran. The Liverpool star, fighting the second bout of the three-fight BKFC deal he signed in April, was cut and then dropped at the end of the third round, saved from a scored knockdown only because the bell had already sounded, and both men spent long stretches visibly respecting what was coming back at them. Till was simply the busier man across the ten minutes, banking rounds behind volume while the 49-year-old Olympic silver medalist hunted single shots that never quite arrived in sequence. Till moves to 2-0 in the squared circle; Romero, now 1-1 in the promotion, leaves with the dignity of a man who made a home favourite bleed for every card. The winner’s attention went immediately upmarket: Till renewed his pursuit of Mike Perry, the fight he has called a dream and told Bloody Elbow he “could probably retire after,” while also aiming words at Manchester’s own Tommy Fury in his post-fight interview. Neither is booked. Both would sell exactly as well as Saturday’s gate suggests. Before he left the ring, Till was also nose to nose with BKFC ironweight and light heavyweight champion Lorenzo Hunt, and the confrontation nearly spilled into a melee.

The co-main event produced the shock of the night, and the format made it theatrical. Jack Cullen, the former professional boxer from Bolton fighting just his third BKFC bout, dethroned long-reigning middleweight world champion David Mundell by split decision, 58-55 and 57-56 against a 57-56 dissent, after the fight was scored a draw through five rounds and sent to a winner-take-all sudden-death sixth. The scorecards’ drama aside, the tape tells a cleaner story: Cullen out-landed the champion at roughly two to one behind crisp jab-led boxing, absorbed the fight’s only knockdown, a Mundell left hook in the second round, and came alive down the stretch of a war the crowd stood for, earning Fight of the Night honours and the belt in the same evening. “He’s a machine,” Cullen said of the dethroned Floridian, who falls to 10-3 after years atop the division. The new champion’s first challenge arrived before he left the ring: unbeaten American Johnny Garbarino climbed through the ropes to make his pitch to the Manchester crowd, and the division reordered itself in real time.

The belts kept moving underneath. Gaz Corran claimed the inaugural BKFC UK middleweight title by stopping Mac Bygraves 26 seconds into the third round, then used his microphone time to call for Perry as well, making the King of Violence the night’s most-requested man. Karl Thompson swept every round, 50-45 across the board, to defend the UK cruiserweight title against Andy Thornton in the card’s third title fight, and local debutant Tyrone Hamer announced himself with a third-round TKO of fellow Mancunian Liam Dooley on the undercard.

The business coda came at the post-event press conference, and it was the night’s most consequential sentence. Feldman, riding the AO Arena’s biggest gate of the year and a global DAZN broadcast, said the promotion has struck a partnership with Major League Soccer, Major League Baseball and the NFL after touring their stadiums, and teased a forthcoming Stadium Series announcement he called huge for the promotion. A bare-knuckle operation that just put nearly sixteen thousand paying customers in a British arena on the strength of two former UFC names and a local title shocker is a promotion whose ambitions have outgrown arena walls, and Saturday was the proof of concept it will point to when the stadium plans arrive. Manchester showed up, bled along, and delivered the building’s biggest crowd of the year. The promotion’s UK experiment is an experiment no longer.