When Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford meet in Las Vegas during the second week of September, a familiar face will be on the scene. Richard Schaefer is back in boxing.

Schaefer, 63, was born and raised in Switzerland. His father was a successful banker, and he followed in his footsteps. In 1981, he came to the United States to study the differences between the American and European banking systems. By 1997, he was deputy CEO for all of UBS’s private banking operations in the United States. A life of wealth in the financial sector lay ahead of him. Then he changed course.

Schaefer had been a boxing fan since childhood. “I remember as a boy,” he says, “waking up in the middle of the night, sneaking into the living room and turning on our old black-and-white TV to watch Muhammad Ali without the sound on so I wouldn’t wake my parents.”

The seeds for Schaefer transitioning from banking to a career in boxing were planted in 1994 when he got married.

"Lilia was a legal secretary for a law firm that had an office in the same building as the bank," he later reminisced. "We crossed paths from time to time, but it took six months for me to get up the courage to ask her out. Finally, we were alone on the elevator one morning and I seized on the moment."

One of Lilia’s nephews was Raul Jaimes, who at the time was working closely with Oscar De La Hoya. Schaefer met himthrough Raul. Fast-forward to 2000. De La Hoya had just lost to Felix Trinidad and wanted to build a business portfolio to prepare for life after boxing. But he didn’t know how. So he asked for help.

"I wouldn't have given up what I had at the bank just to be involved in Oscar's boxing career," Schaefer said years later. "It was Oscar's vision for the future that excited me. The Hispanic market is strong in the United States. I was aware of the immense popularity that Oscar had and I felt that he could become an important brand. So I sat down with Oscar and his attorney. I said, 'This is what I make at the bank. This is what I want you to pay me.' They said yes, and we had a deal."

Schaefer resigned from his job at UBS. “Both of my parents were very unhappy,” he remembers.

The first issue that Schaefer faced in his new role was how to build a business empire around De La Hoya. He wanted to do for him what Mark McCormack had done for Arnold Palmer and David Falk did for Michael Jordan. Under Schaefer’s guidance, De La Hoya’s portfolio expanded to include extensive real estate and media holdings and a substantial equity position in Major League Soccer’s Houston Dynamo. But Golden Boy Promotions became Schaefer's top priority.

Schaefer built Golden Boy into a formidable boxing promotional company. De La Hoya's status as an active fighter gave them significant leverage with HBO, the dominant funding source of that era. But Roy Jones and Lennox Lewis had similar leverage as fighters; they also established promotional companies; and neither of their companies had significant long-term success. Schaefer — Golden Boy’s master architect — was the difference. But over time, he grew frustrated, believing that De La Hoya's personal issues were keeping them from developing the Golden Boy empire as effectively as possible.

“There were two Oscars,” Schaefer says. “There was the Oscar I got involved with at the beginning and then there was the second Oscar.”

Meanwhile, De La Hoya came to believe that Schaefer was failing to fulfill his fiduciary obligation to the company. There was an ugly split and litigation that ended in a settlement calling for a multimillion-dollar payment to Golden Boy.

“I was with Oscar from 2000 to 2014 and doing something I loved to do,” Schaefer say. “We had 14 great years together and three very bad months at the end.”

In 2016, Schaefer returned to boxing with the backing of institutional investors and founded Ringstar Sports. “We signed Joe Joyce and Tony Yoka out of the Olympics,” he said. “And we had some other promising fighters.”

At the same time, Schaefer was helping Kalle Sauerland build the World Boxing Super-Series, which served as a launching pad for Oleksandr Usyk and Naoya Inoue.

“Then DAZN and Eddie Hearn came in,” Schaefer says. “They completely changed the payment structure and made boxing a business that wasn’t run like a business. I don’t like to operate a non-sustainable business, so I took a step back and wound down Ringstar.”

In 2021, he returned to the fray.

Harrison Whitman (Top Rank’s former general counsel) asked Schaefer if he would meet with a group of businessmen to discuss running a new promotional company called Probellum that had been founded by Ali Shams Pour, who owns Glentoran FC in Northern Ireland.

Schaefer agreed to serve as Probellum’s president. Eric Winter, formerly an executive with UFC, would be the chief operating officer. Anthony Petosa, with a decade of production experience at UFC, was charged with shaping the look and feel of platform content. Anthony Catanzaro, previously the senior boxing advisor for Barclays Center, was slated to become vice president of business operations.

Probellum, Schaefer said in an interview with ESPN, would take a global approach to boxing and prioritize markets that had been neglected in the past. Co-promotional agreements were announced with companies in Latvia, Australia and Ghana with the tease that there would be “over one hundred announcements in the coming days and weeks.”

Probellum, Schaefer pledged, would “support boxing from the grassroots level to major championship bouts” and promote or co-promote close to 100 events in its first year. Eighty to 90 percent of these events would be held outside of the United States.

“We want to work with every promoter. We want to work with every manager," Schaefer said.

But there was a problem.

Probellum was linked to Daniel Kinahan. And on April 11, 2022, the United States Treasury Department sanctioned Kinahan, as well as six other individuals and three companies that he was believed to have done business with, for what the government said was his role as “leader of the Kinahan Organized Crime Group.”

“Like every promoter in the world, we were working with Daniel Kinahan,” Schaefer says. “Then the shit hit the fan and the whole thing fell apart.”

In 2023, Schaefer became president of Anthem Sports, a Canadian company that focused on MMA and wrestling. But it wasn’t a good fit. And he missed boxing. Then, in early 2024, Floyd Mayweather asked if he would work with Mayweather Promotions.

“I decided to do what I was passionate about,” Schaefer says “So I left Anthem. I was never CEO of Mayweather Promotions. That was just something Floyd said to the media. I enjoyed working with Floyd, but I wanted to do more.”

That brings us to Schaefer and Canelo Alvarez.

“Last December,” Richard said, “Canelo called and asked if he could meet with me to talk about restructuring his businesses. We’d always gotten along well. Our relationship went back to when Canelo was a young man fighting for Golden Boy. So we got together. We talked. And I said I’d be honored to work with him.”

Schaefer now oversees all of Alvarez's business ventures in addition to managing his equity portfolio. Eddy Reynoso, who serves as boxing manager in addition to being his trainer, welcomes the input with regard to boxing managerial decisions.

In the past, there had been friction between Alvarez and Turki Alalshikh. But Schaefer is a good diplomat.

“The first thing I did for Canelo,” he says, “was set up a meeting with His Excellency in London in January [concurrent with the Ring Magazine Awards] to iron out the differences between them. We put together a three-fight deal within 24 hours that, later, became a four-fight deal when His Excellency added the May fight in Riyadh against William Scull.

“There are business parallels between Canelo and Oscar. But with Oscar, we were building a business portfolio from scratch. And Canelo had substantial business interests by the time I got involved with him. Also, Canelo has a different reach. He’s loved in Mexico, and the pride that he has in representing Mexico comes from the heart. Canelo now has more than 30 businesses in Mexico. He makes more money outside the ring than he makes in it. I honestly believe that, very soon, he will be the first fighter ever whose net worth exceeds one billion dollars.”

Could Alvarez's business interests come to include promoting?

“I wasn’t planning to get involved on the promotional side of boxing again,” Schaefer says. “But boxing is like a religion in Mexico. And right now, no one is investing in building young Mexican fighters. A Mexico-centric boxing promotional business, if it’s well-run, could be enormously successful. And Canelo would be an excellent promoter. He’s very smart. He listens and learns. Will he promote? It’s possible. There’s an opportunity and a possibility, both in Mexico and the United States. Who knows what might happen in the future.”

Schaefer now lives in Los Angeles. He and Lilia have been married for 32 years. Their three sons have good jobs and are growing professionally. When it comes to investing and increasing wealth, taking money and turning it into more money, Schaefer is brilliant.

“I spend 100 percent of my working time now on Canelo,” Schaefer says. “This is a dream job for me. Canelo is completely reliable. It’s a joy to work with him. I wake up every morning, happy and loving what I do.”

Meanwhile, one has to ask, what does Schaefer see in the future for boxing? In the past, he has called the sweet science one of the few undervalued assets in sports. Does he still feel that way?

“Absolutely,” he says. “More so now than ever. Look at the valuations in other sports. The Boston Celtics were sold this year for $6.1 billion. Two years ago, the Washington Commanders were sold for $6 billion. And those buyers bought one team, not an entire league. Boxing has a global footprint. It appeals to people all over the world. The revenue that flows from a big boxing event is staggering.

“No one will ever control all of boxing. But the opportunity is there for someone to come in and reorganize the sport. His Excellency has a vision. This isn’t a hobby for him. Can TKO make its boxing program self-sustaining? The UFC pays 17 [percent] to 20 percent of its revenue to talent. In the NFL and NBA, that number is 50%. At the highest levels in boxing, it’s often 80%. Maybe an adjustment downward from 80% is necessary to make boxing a viable business. But 17 [percent] to 20 percent won’t work. There are so many unanswered questions. The next 12 to 24 months will be fascinating.”