Naoya Inoue beat Ramon Cardenas by eighth-round stoppage at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on Sunday, May 4, 2025, and kept his undisputed super bantamweight titles. He had to get up off the canvas in the second round to do it.
Inoue has won three more times since, the last of them a unanimous decision over Junto Nakatani at the Tokyo Dome on May 2, 2026, and he is 33-0 with 27 knockouts. ESPN’s boxing schedule, updated September 24, 2026, lists no next fight for him.
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How Inoue vs. Cardenas went
Cardenas came in on a 14-fight winning streak. At the end of the second round he caught Inoue with a counter left hook and put him down, and ESPN reported that Inoue went back to his corner on shaky legs.
Inoue rebuilt it behind the jab and went to the body. He dropped Cardenas with three right hands at the end of the seventh, then finished it early in the eighth with a seven-punch combination that forced the stoppage at the 45-second mark. The crowd was 8,474.
| Fighter | Record after the fight | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Naoya Inoue | 30-0, 27 KOs | Kept the undisputed super bantamweight titles |
| Ramon Cardenas | 26-2 | Winning streak ended at 14 |
ESPN called it the fight that saved an underwhelming weekend, after Canelo Alvarez, Ryan Garcia and Devin Haney failed to impress on the Friday and Saturday. On the Inoue undercard, Rafael Espinoza kept his WBO featherweight title with a seventh-round stoppage of Edward Vazquez.
What Inoue did next
Cardenas was the second of four wins for Inoue in 2025. The first was a fourth-round knockout of late replacement Ye Joon Kim at Ariake Arena in Tokyo on January 24, 2025.
| Date | Opponent | Where | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 14, 2025 | Murodjon Akhmadaliev | Nagoya, Japan | Won by decision, 118-110, 118-110, 117-111 |
| December 27, 2025 | David Picasso | Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Won by decision, 119-109, 120-108, 117-111 |
| May 2, 2026 | Junto Nakatani | Tokyo Dome, Japan | Won by decision, 116-112, 115-113, 116-112 |
Nakatani was unbeaten at 32-0 going in. ESPN reported a sold-out crowd of 55,000 and called it the biggest fight in Japanese boxing history. Inoue kept the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO belts at 122 pounds. After the Cardenas fight he had talked about moving up to featherweight to try for undisputed status in a third division, and our Nakatani page covers his rival’s earlier run.
Betting Inoue’s next fight
No opponent or date is set, so this page names no price. Prices on a champion who is 33-0 tend to be short, and short prices are easy to misread. A fighter at -1000 has to win 90.9% of the time to break even, and one at -5000 has to win 98.0% of the time.
Our boxing odds and predictions cover the big cards as they are booked, and our sportsbook reviews compare the books that price boxing.