Every numbered WLC card from the 2017 debut to the present — what happened, who finished whom, and why each card mattered.
The World Lethwei Championship is the youngest of the major international combat-sport promotions and the only one built specifically around Myanmar's bareknuckle tradition. This page documents every numbered WLC card from the August 2017 debut to the present, with the headline bout, the venue, and a short note on what the card meant in context.
Combat-sport promotions are remembered by their narratives, not their statistics. A single contested decision can shape a federation's judging policy for the next five years. A single televised finish can launch an international career. The WLC's first nine years are exactly long enough that the early cards are starting to fade from the casual viewer's memory and short enough that the contemporary record is still recoverable in detail. The purpose of this archive is to fix that record before it becomes oral history.
Each event entry below is summarised — the full round-by-round treatment of the most consequential bouts lives in the Fight Analysis section. The entries here are the level of detail that lets a reader place a bout in its calendar context: which card it was on, what happened on the rest of the card, what the headline was, and why the result mattered.
The debut card. Five international fighters on the card, three Myanmar champions. Washington-Tun Tun Min headlined as the continuation of a 2014 rivalry; the bout ended in a draw and set the WLC's tone — international scope, Myanmar core.
Leduc's first WLC bout after winning the MTLF Golden Belt the prior December. He finished Faria with a third-round elbow. The bout introduced Faria to the international audience as a credible top-weight contender.
A controversial draw that, under modern judging criteria, would almost certainly have been a Tukhtaboyev decision. Cited often in arguments for the WLC's later move to standardised 10-point must scoring.
The first WLC bout matching two Karen-state-trained fighters at top level. Lone Chaw's technical clinch won a unanimous decision and established him as the modern technical reference at the weight.
The Faria–Saw Nga Mann bout that produced the unanimous decision most foreign observers thought should have gone to Faria. The card was the catalyst for the WLC publishing its judging instructions in full.
Leduc's first defence of a WLC-sanctioned Openweight title. The trilogy was officially closed with a Leduc decision; the bout drew the largest WLC pay-per-view buy of the year.
The first women's-strawweight headline at a WLC card. Manfredi finished by clinch knee in the fourth and began the reign that has anchored the women's division since.
Tun Tun Min moved up to middleweight to fight Phyan Thwei in a non-title catchweight. Phyan Thwei's pressure-fighting carried the cards. Considered the breakout bout for the modern middleweight era.
Saladiak's first WLC main event. The Polish combinations were on full display and the bout ended in a fifth-round TKO via cuts. Established Saladiak as the technical European reference at the weight.
Manfredi defended the strawweight title against the Karen contender in a split decision that critics outside Myanmar continue to argue should have gone to Ei Phyu Lwin. The closed-door format gave the bout a strange atmosphere on the broadcast.
Moisa's WLC debut after a long amateur tour. He finished by frontal-bone headbutt in round two — the cleanest debut finish in WLC history and the signal of a generational shift in the lighter divisions.
Tukhtaboyev's switch-kick game versus Lone Chaw's clinch in a bout that produced a unanimous decision for the Uzbek fighter. The first Central Asian winner of a WLC headline.
The middleweight contender bout that defined the division for the next cycle. Phyan Thwei pressed Saladiak into round-four exhaustion and finished with a clinch knee. Saladiak rebounded in 2023 but the loss reshaped the divisional pecking order.
Leduc's first defence after a long layoff. He finished Faria in round three with a corner elbow that opened a deep cut over the brow — the same brow Faria had previously had surgery on. Cited often in the safety/responsibility chapter.
Manfredi's longest title defence to date. A close decision that confirmed Kurbanova as a credible contender and signalled that Manfredi's reign would not extend indefinitely.
Three patterns are visible across the WLC's recorded card history. The first is the gradual broadening of the geographic roster — early cards relied on Myanmar versus single Western fighter matchups; the modern cards routinely feature international-versus-international bouts at the top, with the Myanmar fighter slot now shared rather than guaranteed. The second is the slow professionalisation of judging. The controversial decisions of the 2017–2019 era are uncommon now, not because judging has become uniformly correct but because the WLC has invested in published criteria and trained panels in a way that did not exist at launch. The third is the widening of the women's division, from a single sanctioned title to four active divisions with credible champions.
What the archive does not show, and what serious Lethwei readers should bear in mind, is the parallel traditional circuit. MTLF-sanctioned bouts outside the WLC have continued across the same period and have produced their own championship narratives — some of which intersect the WLC record at the Golden Belt level, most of which do not. The traditional sandpit calendar runs in parallel and is not captured here at all. A complete Lethwei archive would need to include both threads; this page documents only the professionalised international thread.