Jake Paul Can Kick Dana White's Ass

Does anyone doubt it? Competition is back in MMA, period

Mega MMA news from the Wall Street Journal this morning: Jake Paul and Nikisa Badarian’s MVP is merging with the PFL to form MVP MMA:

Operating under the MVP banner, the new company will remain privately owned and have a roster of nearly 400 athletes. MVP historically focused on boxing, while PFL centers on mixed martial arts; the merged company will put on fights for both sports.

PFL Chief Executive John Martin, who will run the combined company, has had his eye on major combat sports for well over a decade. The former Time Warner executive said he tried twice, unsuccessfully, to persuade his colleagues there to buy UFC.

“This is personal for me,” said Martin, who has trained in combat sports and joined PFL last year. “In the world of sports, there are very few opportunities that have as much growth ahead of them as combat sports,” he said, adding that he wanted to create a competitor to UFC.

This is the biggest competition the UFC has faced since they bought out Strikeforce in 2011.

Ari Emanuel’s WME Group, which has owned the UFC since 2016 (and formed TKO as a holding company to combine UFC and new acquisition WWE), has NEVER faced serious competition.

Three main factors will separate MVP MMA from the likes of Bellator and PFL:

1. Promotional acumen

2. Professional management

3. Netflix

Let’s talk about each factor in turn.

Jake Paul Can Sell Wolf Tickets, Imagine What He Can Do With Real Fights

The current team actually running the UFC on the day-to-day — Hunter Campbell and matchmakers Mick Maynard and Sean Shelby — do a lot of things well, but one thing they’ve never had to do is face actual competition.

Their job is to serve up “blocks of content,” aka fight slop, to fill out time slots for media partners who have already overpaid for said slop.

I’ll shit on TKO’s “fight promotion” style more extensively in a few paragraphs, but first allow me to sing the praises of Jake Paul and his partner Nakisa Badarian.

These guys took a YouTube influencer with a huge fanbase and sub-professional boxing talent and built him up into one of the biggest promotional draws in boxing history.

Yea the fights mostly sucked, were set up against hand-picked opponents and ultimately ended in Paul’s humiliation and career-ending injury at the gloves of Anthony Joshua, but in the combat sports business that is called getting the job done.

Jake Paul was the 21st Century Primo Carnera, as I explained last November.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the proof:

Yea, I know Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson was bullshit and a disgrace to the sport and Tyson’s legacy and yadda yadda yadda.

The reality is it was what 60 million people wanted to see, and it convinced Netflix first to take a chance on streaming live sports content and second to keep coming back for more.

The Rousey-Rousey card — which featured another bullshit senior league bout as headliner but stacked the undercard with rising talent and compelling matchups — proved that MVP was more than a Jake Paul-dependent one-trick pony.

The evidence for that is that the UFC has swooped in and signed Salahdine Parnasse — a fighter they had made a point of repeatedly passing on when he was a star in Poland’s KSW for nine years — and is rushing him into a main event debut in September in Paris.

Now that MVP will have a contractually locked-in roster — that includes the world’s most exciting and best female fighter Dakota Ditcheva — the UFC will be facing real apples-to-apples competition for the first time in 15 years.

No One at TKO Can Sell Fights Like Jake Paul

Since ESPN took on the risk (and upside) of UFC pay-per-view events in 2019, the TKO team's mandate for any given event has been to find two dudes to make a semi-credible headliner from amongst the 500+ fighters on their roster and fill out the rest of the card with “Guys Fighting!”

ESPN took the risk and took the upside profits. That worked great when the UFC was still putting on Jon Jones or Conor McGregor fights a couple of times a year that more than made up for the other money-losing (for ESPN) duds on the schedule.

By the end of the ESPN deal, TKO was rarely either willing or able to deliver numbered events that would break the profit line for ESPN. And why should they when every event was guaranteed profit for them — especially given the dismal 15% revenue share that went to fighters.

That’s why ESPN didn’t re-up with the UFC. It’s also a big, big factor in Netflix’ decision to pass on buying the numbered events in 2025 — despite Mark Shapiro giving them a 45-day exclusive negotiating window to do so.

Let’s face facts (and sworn court testimony), Dana White isn’t involved in the day-to-day matchmaking at the UFC and hasn’t been in years.

A formerly great mouthpiece who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, White has been checked out for years. Spending more time in casinos and on set with his 20-something influencer crushes Nina Drama and Adin Ross than he spends cageside, White barely preps for his Instagram fight announcements and often seems to have no idea who the fighters he’s selling are.

Joe Silva was the fight booking genius who put together the legendary matchups that the red-faced, lip-smacking Dana White sold so well anyhow.

As for the current crew of Hunter Campbell, Sean Shelby and Mick Maynard?

They might excel at forcing fighters to take low paydays and short-notice fights, but honestly, I’m not convinced those asshats could sell tickets to the prison beatdown of the Tesla Road Rage guy, much less the no-interest dreck they’re actually booking.

Shit like: Magomed Ankalaev vs. Bogdan Guskov, Jailton Almeida vs. Derrick Lewis, Aspen Ladd vs. Norma Dumont, Raquel Pennington vs. Mayra Bueno Silva, Alexandre Pantoja vs. Steve Erceg, Mackenzie Dern vs. Angela Hill, Abus Magomedov vs. Sean Strickland, or Jairzinho Rozenstruik vs. Shamil Gaziev (and believe me I could go on for another 1000 words just listing shitty UFC headliners from the 2020s).

There’s a thing that happens to people who've been getting away with selling absolute slop to an underinformed and captive audience for years — they get fat, lazy, and stupid.

For comparison, here are the best-ever network numbers the UFC has ever pulled; note how many of them were on Brazilian TV in the 2010s.

And I know this doesn’t include pay-per-view events. Here’s the deal: PPV is dead. In the past, like flip phones, fax machines, silent movies, and radio comedies.

So it doesn’t mean shit what UFC did with Conor vs Khabib or Brock vs Frank Mir. PPV was a whole different game and that game is over.

MVP vs UFC will be about how many raw eyeballs can be drawn to a paid subscription service. Period.

And that’s where MVP has its real ace-in-the-hole.

Netflix > Paramount

It’s not even close.

I’ll let this Fortune article about how Netflix is “the one platform to rule them all” make the case (note this was about a congressional hearing freaking out when it looked like Netflix would buy WBD):

Netflix is already the dominant player in subscription video-on-demand, and its acquisition of Warner Bros. could cement its unrivaled monopoly.

…

Netflix already enjoys substantial pricing power. It has been able to increase the cost of its standard and premium packages by 29% and 39%, respectively, since 2020, while still continuing to amass more viewers. Netflix also charges a price premium relative to its peers, which further indicates power. If it were constrained by user-generated platforms, as the merger proponents would have you believe, then subscribers would cancel their subscriptions in favor of YouTube or TikTok. Yet they haven’t.
…
Under a reasonable definition of the SVOD market, Netflix’s market dominance is impossible to ignore. It currently has about a third of all streaming subscribers worldwide.

Or the LA Times in 2024 declaring Netflix won the streaming wars:

The so-called streaming wars are over, they say. Netflix has won. As evidence, they point to rival studios that are now licensing more of their programs to Netflix, including HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and “Insecure,” after years of holding onto their big action movies and popular shows for their own platforms.

“Their competitors are so desperate to make money, they’re giving this content to Netflix,” said Jeffrey Wlodarczak, chief executive of Pivotal Research Group. “This is what winning is.”

As for Paramount, I’ll let this picture of Google headlines do the work of thousands of words:

Game on bitches, I for one, can’t wait to be excited about MMA again.

As for my headline, the one and only remaining Jake Paul fight I’d actually pay to see would be to see him beat up Dana White.

MMA Draw Editor-in-Chief Nate Wilcox founded Bloody Elbow in 2007 and sold it in 2024.