June 2026 HEMA ratings show tight steel single sidesword title race

Massimiliano Cappello led June's steel single sidesword table with 1,911.5 points, just 8.2 ahead of Mateusz Leksander, but the sharper headline was the size behind the standings: HEMA Ratings logged 153 tournaments, 1,747 fighters and 9,974 bouts in the category. The board was deep enough to keep every result live, with 662 fighters on the main island and 207 more spread across four islands.

The top seven stayed packed tightly enough to make one event feel like a title swing. Daniel Pope climbed from fifth to third on 1,852.7, Theophile Przybylak sat fourth at 1,826.8, Giordano Moreni was fifth at 1,772.2, Miro Lahtela sixth at 1,771.6 and Domenico Fichera seventh at 1,771.2. The gap from first to seventh was only 140.3 points, a narrow margin in a system that turns every bout into ranking currency.

The month also produced movement deeper down the list. Anthony Duong was the highest-rated newcomer on the main island, debuting at 1,305.2 and landing 244th, while Liam Schofield made the biggest climb on the main island, jumping from 879 to 1,147.2. Lachlan Porter logged the category's biggest upset by winning a fight with an estimated 17.50 percent chance, exactly the kind of result HEMA Ratings is built to magnify because its Glicko-2 model rewards the wins it least expects.

That is why the standings matter beyond the numbers on the page. HEMA Ratings says it collects results from as many tournaments as possible, uses the ratings for tournament seeding and tracks individual progress through the same system. Single sidesword still trails the flagship boards in raw scale, with longsword at 7,547 fighters on the main island, sabre at 3,113 and single rapier at 1,879, but June's total still pointed to a real international circuit rather than a side division padded by a few local events.

Melbourne helped prove the point. Melbourne HEMA Open 2026 recorded 90 fights and 30 fighters in Mixed Steel Single Sidesword Open, while Sidesword Comp 2024 logged 72 fights and 21 fighters. The weapon itself, a late-15th-century Italian cut-and-thrust sword often used with a dagger, shield, cloak or gauntlet, now sits in a ranking race where one strong weekend can move a fighter several places and one upset can reshape the title picture.