Meet the Birchalls: the most hotly tipped family in British boxing

Taken from the autumn 25 issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

As far back as he can remember, William Birchall was fighting with his brothers. And not just a bit.

​“We were young lads,” says William, the 24-year-old hungrily scranning chicken and rice from his plate in the Manchester Arndale centre branch of Nando’s. ​“And we were killing each other in my mum and dad’s living room, ripping the wallpaper off at the same time.”

William remembers looking down at his brothers, Nelson and Leighton, their pink cheeks streaming with tears – and giving it to them no less severely: ​“I was a lot older, yeah, but I never took it light on them. I always used to fill them in.”

His rationale, even then, was about fighting spirit. ​“If you can take it from me,” he argues, ​“you can take it off someone your own size.”

That, he says, returning to the chicken on his plate, is why the Birchalls have won. Between them, the battling brothers have scooped a glut of amateur international titles, as well as a joint undefeated run at professional level. And it’s why they’re going to keep on winning.

Nelson, 20, and Leighton, 19, firmly agree. They’re sitting at the wide, wooden table with their dad, as well as their longtime coach Taylor Walker. Warming to the theme, Leighton remembers one particularly nasty Christmas scrap. ​“I put Nelson through the tree,” says Leighton. ​“That was a bit of a turning point.”

Nobody knows how the Birchall brothers fight quite like the Birchall brothers. Watch one of them box and you’ll see the other two ringside, shouting advice that only they understand; a secret harmony built on blood knowledge.

“[It’s about] things that I know Nelson has landed on me before,” explains William, ​“or that I’ve seen he’s done to other kids in the past, and try[ing] to replicate that.”

But, as many opponents have learned to their cost, knowing one brother’s style doesn’t mean you know them all. The trio are very different fighters. William, Leighton explains, has ​“dynamite power in both hands. Nelson is just a horrible bastard to be in the ring with. And me? I can make you miss 500 shots in a row.”

In March this year, following successful amateur careers, William, a featherweight, and Leighton, a super bantamweight, made their professional boxing debuts on the same night at Liverpool’s M&S Bank Arena. Both brothers scored second-round stoppage wins, with William defeating Nicaraguan fighter Engel Gomez and Leighton besting Hungary’s Laszlo Bernath.

Nelson, the self-described ​“sexy” southpaw, also a featherweight, turned pro in 2023 and is undefeated after eight professional bouts. All three have signed to legendary promoter Frank Warren’s Queensberry Promotions, whose roster includes Tyson Fury, the Manchester-born heavyweight who lives in their native Morecambe.

The Birchalls have, as William puts it, ​“got national titles coming out of our arses”, referring to the countless colours they earned in their amateur careers. Now they have their eyes on an even bigger prize: going all the way to the top as brothers. ​“We’re only just getting started,” says William.

On this summer afternoon in Manchester, the Birchalls are all at different stages of preparation for fights – most pressingly, after our meeting, Nelson is flying out to train in Thailand – and their world stops for nothing. In conversation, they are, by anyone’s estimation, lovely lads: polite and all smiles in a way that belies William’s blunt summary of their sport as ​“a hurt game, not a ballet dance,” and ​‚at its most stark, ​“getting in there and punching each other in the face”. These days, to keep focus, they share a house in Liverpool, needing to ​“lock ourselves away from the world a bit”, as Nelson puts it, even if it means removing themselves from their tight-knit wider family.

William, Nelson and Leighton were born in Morecambe in 2001, 2004 and 2006. A north west sea-side town on the edge of Lancaster city, Morecambe was, at its early 20^th-century peak, a more upmarket, art deco sister to the larger resort of Blackpool an hour down the coast. Both, however, suffered the same fate when cheap foreign travel reversed the appeal of the British beach holiday and today, as in much of Lancashire, Morecambe’s child poverty rate is higher than the national average. But the boys had a good, loving upbringing in the Westgate area of town, about a mile back from the seafront promenade and home to a vast caravan park.

​“If you ever come to our house,” explains Nelson of the Birchall family home, ​“there’s a sign saying: ​‘Welcome to the Madhouse’. Three sons who all do boxing, two sisters as well, and our little nephew.” Their dad, also William, who’s at Nando’s today but describes himself as ​“interview shy” (he walks off to eat a large pudding in presumably rare peace), runs a caravan business in Morecambe.

The Birchalls are proud Travellers, part of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities that have, in the 21^st century, often been the engine of British boxing success. Today, more than 71,000 people in the UK identify as Gypsy, Roma and Traveller, but with far fewer living on the road owing to the hostile legislation of successive governments attacking their historic right to roam.

William was 12 years old when he first set foot in a gym. ​“I was always the littlest in my friendship group,” says the elder brother, ​“and I didn’t want to get picked on.” Leighton remembers William as a talented footballer, ​“but one day he came back from school and wanted to go to the boxing gym. My dad took him, we followed, and that was it. We never turned back.” In the Travelling community, ​“90 per cent of the time, we don’t tend to go high school,” Nelson chips in. “[Instead], we tend to work. That’s what you’re brought up to do.” For the Birchalls, that meant working with their dad. But it also meant pursuing their sporting passion. ​“We always wanted to be boxers, but it don’t come easy,” he acknowledges.

Ask where their present-day success has come from and Nelson points to their daily routines, which began once they reached high-school age: wake up at 6am. Three or four-mile run. A day’s shift with dad on the caravans. Go to the gym after work. ​“At the gym,” remembers Nelson, ​“we’d do the beginners’ class, then the seniors’ class, then do two-hour sessions where grown-ass men would only do one.” It didn’t end there.

​“Dad would tell us to jog back home while he picked up the food, so that’s another three or four miles.” Being Traveller boxers from Morecambe has naturally invited comparisons with Tyson Fury, who generously allowed THE FACE to photograph the brothers at his gym at Mazuma Stadium, Morecambe. I ask about the connection.

​“Tyson Fury is, right now, the richest sportsman to have ever come out of the UK,” says Nelson, referring to the July news that Fury is the most financially successful sports figure in British history (yes, even richer than David Beckham). ​“The biggest figure in boxing right now is a Gypsy man,” adds Nelson, but he points out that stigmas persist. ​“I don’t think people give us credit for what we are.”

Discrimination against Gypsy, Roma and Travelling people in the UK has been described as ​“troublingly persistent” by human rights groups, with Turner Prize-nominated artist Delaine Le Bas, who is of Romani heritage, this year describing attitudes as ​“stuck in place” compared with gains by other groups. ​“I think sometimes we are targeted for things,” says Nelson. It’s not hard to see a desire to counteract those perceptions as part of the drive that motivates the Birchalls. The brothers guess that they have fought in something like every boxing gym in the UK.“ Because we’re Travelling lads,” says William, ​“we used to travel all around the country with my dad. The Isle of Wight, Scotland, Newquay, we’ve been all over.” In the end, though, the gym that came before all others was in Blackpool.

In 2014, former amateur boxer Andy Abrol set up Sharpstyle Boxing Gym in a flat-roof, single-storey building on a quiet street near Blackpool Pleasure Beach. He wanted to coach a tight-knit group of kids – often naughty, not unlike his former self – who would hopefully transition to pro under his guidance. He achieved it time and again, producing over 40 national champions including Preston’s Monae Smith (in 2022, a National Junior Champion at 15) and his own son, Jake (nicknamed ​“Jabs”, now 22 and professional with 13 successive wins behind him).

​“When I go [into Sharpstyle], it’s like going to college,” says Luiz Faye, a boxing coach, disability campaigner and media personality who has closely followed the Birchalls’ rise. ​“Andy isn’t just asking the lads to do something. He’s asking them to think about why they’re doing it. These lads [and lasses] study the game.”

For Luiz, clubs like Sharpstyle are a ​“lifeline” for young people in often-deprived areas like Blackpool. ​“You don’t have to get punched in the face to enjoy the benefits of boxing,” she argues, pointing to the sport’s proven impact on social cohesion and crime reduction.

Throughout their teenage years, twice a day on weekdays and at least once on weekends, the Birchalls’ mum Kelly would pack the boys in the car and bomb it down the Fylde Coast from Morecambe to Blackpool, an hour’s journey each way. ​“Some mothers would say, ​‘I can’t do that,’” says Nelson. ​“There and back? Twice a day? Sitting in the car while we trained…”

It was at Sharpstyle that the boys met Taylor Walker. Taylor started there in 2019 and remembers that part of his initiation was coaching the brothers. It was not, all parties agree, entirely straightforward. ​“They terrorised the life out of me,” remembers Taylor, 31, from Blackpool, a man whose serene but amused manner suggests someone who has probably seen quite a bit. ​“I’d train them twice a day and I’d go home feeling like I was going to cry.”

Every night, he would think: I’m not going back there. But he’d always be there at 6am the next morning, enduring the young boys trying out snide MMA moves on him, or pinching his iPhone to post mad Insta stories and text nonsense to his mates. Soon he grew to love the brothers. ​“We created a good bond pretty fast.”

Even today, with the Birchalls all having separate trainers and regimes, they do two sessions a week with Taylor. ​“Tay came into our life when we was kids, not men,” summarises William. ​“This is the guy who trained us for free and wouldn’t take a pound off us. This is the guy we’ll never forget, and he’ll come to the top with us.” I ask them their favourite Taylor memory and before I can finish the sentence, they harmonise in unison: ​“Italy”. Their coach smiles wide.

​“I was on a GPS tracker from the police at the time,” remembers Taylor, politely declining to detail why. He asked his probation officer if he could fly out to Italy to support Leighton in a 2022 bout. Probation said no. ​“Leighton was upset straight away,” Taylor remembers of the younger Birchall, who he views as his ​“little baby brother”. So Taylor made a deal: if Leighton made it to the finals, his coach would rip off his tag and fly out anyway.

It was, then, with some mixed feelings that Taylor watched Leighton knocking out his semi-final opponent on TV.

He understood what he had to do.

​“I booked a flight, packed a bag and ripped off my security tag.” Taylor knew that the private security company didn’t work weekends: he rang them late on the Friday, telling him the tag had fallen off. The firm said they’d come out on Monday.

Taylor reckons he had about half an hour’s sleep that whole weekend. ​“I remember it all so clearly, it was amazing. I was like an idiot abroad. We were all close, but that was the moment that really set us apart.” Leighton won the fight, and the security tag was refitted on the Monday, no questions asked.

Though today the brothers’ success looks simultaneous and straightforward, they had three very different journeys to the pro game. For William, within two years of walking into a gym for the first time, he’d won the English Schoolboy Championships and travelled to Russia to compete for his country (“like Blackpool out of season” is his distant memory of that event). But after the pandemic hit, he took the abrupt decision to retire from boxing, something he today rationalises as the result of being negatively affected by the Covid lockdowns.

​“I didn’t think I was going to box again,” he remembers of a time when the mounting pressure of bills and endless time sitting inside took its toll. But he watched as Nelson found his fight, and knew that he would regret it for the rest of his life if he didn’t return.

​“I went from being the underdog,” says Nelson, ​“never winning anything, to being number one.” The middle brother had the slowest start out of his siblings, but went the furthest the quickest. Still, even he had his doubts. ​“I packed it in 560 times,” he laughs, ​“and that was it: ​‘I’m never boxing again.’” The next day, he would always be back in the gym.

​“My guilty pleasure,” he smiles sheepishly as he explains the secret to his success, ​“is that I probably like having a fight a little too much.” This is in contrast to his brothers, he explains, who are more ​“box-ified. I like having a scrap.”

For Leighton, his challenges were the opposite. ​“I was naturally talented,” explains the youngest brother, direct as a drill. ​“I’ve always had it, since I was a baby. I won every national title from 10 to 18. I was always the favourite, and I’ve always had the pressure to perform.”

For Luiz, the brothers’ mix of styles is part of their appeal. ​“Whenever I see them [in the ring] I’m excited,” she says, praising their politeness and relatability as well as their sporting prowess. ​“Obviously you want to win in boxing, and I love the competitiveness between the three of them. But it’s the camaraderie and support that’s there in equal measure, too.”

For Taylor, Leighton is ​“very cheeky, very likeable,” while Nelson is ​“a stubborn arsehole, awkward in boxing and personality”. And what’s unusual about William, the trainer continues, is how much he’s a mix of the two of them. As for the brothers’ own assessment of their respective skills: what they share, William thinks, is ​“extremely good boxing brains. You’ve got to set your shot up to land your shot, and you need to know where you’ll be after it [because] something might be coming back after it. There’s always a game plan behind it.”

For William, the future is about making good on the sacrifices that the whole family made. Their sisters didn’t get to have a normal upbringing – the ​“madhouse” was all geared towards the boys and the game. The only time their parents have had holidays, William points out, is following their fights. ​“And even then,” he says, ​“it’s not a holiday, because they’re stressing about us fighting. They’ve missed out on a lot of life and it’s up to us to repay them.” What does that look like? ​“Get to the world title,” he says of the brothers’ rock solid ambition, ​“send my dad into retirement early. That’s the plan and it will happen. One million per cent. You heard it here now.”

Boxing, the legendary sports writer Donald McRae wrote last year, ​“is as crooked and destructive as it is magnificent and transformative”, summing up the sport’s unique and unusual contrasts. But right now, near the start of careers that could go all the way, it’s all glory and possibility for the Birchall brothers. I ask where they’d like to be in five years’ time.

​“Rich!” shoots back Nelson. ​“Hopefully a world champion with plenty of money in the bank.” For Leighton it’s ​“undisputed world super bantam champion”. William, though, chews on it.

​“Five years’ time?” A pause. ​“I’ve got no response to that, because the sky is the limit for us boys. I’d be doing myself in by saying something.” He pauses again. ​“One thing: we’re going to be in a million times’ better place, and people will actually understand why we stuck at it.”

Remember the names: Birchall, Birchall and Birchall. ​“We’re going to be the best one day.”