Rousey vs. Carano Is MVP's Big Shot on Netflix
Will the audience buy into Jake Paul's "Fighter First" sales pitch?
One word comes to mind in describing this weekend’s Most Valuable Promotions MMA event on Netflix: old.
For some fighters, old in age. For other personalities, old in shtick.
When Netflix & MVP announced Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano in a legacy dream MMA fight, our reaction was pretty similar to most hardcore fans.
There’s no reason to believe that this upcoming event on Saturday won’t draw eyeballs on Netflix. For MVP’s sake, let’s hope it doesn’t bomb like the Tyson Fury fight from Tottenham did. (A fight whose viewership numbers are hard to come by.)
For the sake of the fight industry, an MVP success could open up some opportunities for future fighters, sponsors, and media platforms. There is no reason to root against this event.
That said, the performance of MVP in hyping up this event has left a lot to be desired. At least it’s not Jake Paul vs. Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. from a year ago, but that’s a pretty low bar. The lowest of bars.
The official preview for Saturday’s fight by Netflix reveals some interesting framing.
We have five key observations about the strange vibes surrounding Saturday’s event.
Using the UFC as the boogeyman
Other than calling her fat and out of shape, there is no real heat between Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano. That’s a horrible problem for a fight promoter to have.
This is on top of the advanced age of the competitors and the absence of any evidence that either Rousey or Carano could compete with the best in the sport today.
If you can’t substantively market drama (as we recently witnessed with Khamzat Chimaev vs. Sean Strickland at UFC 328), or legit competition, then you have to try to market a process play.
There’s the sales pitch about fighters making $40,000 as a minimum baseline. It has fallen on deaf ears. Fans don’t care about fighter pay unless they make a direct connection between lousy fighter pay and terrible matchmaking, which UFC has been rather helpful with in their 2026 Paramount campaign.
Poor Uncle Dana and Evil Hunter Campbell.
Ronda has been loving up on Dana in a very strange way.
‘Dana’s not in charge anymore, which is why UFC sucks.’
Yes, he is the brand ambassador we love to mock, but most people still believe that he is in charge, which is why this attack doesn’t work.
Meanwhile, Ronda is unloading on Hunter Campbell as an evil nepo-baby executive who came into UFC as a legal intern because of his father, Don Campbell, and made his bones at the UFC because he helped Dana out in a big pinch (allegedly a sex extortion case that went to trial).
For good measure, Ronda trashed Hunter Campbell for his wild promises made in a Saturday morning emergency meeting to get Power Slap sanctioned by the California State Athletic Commission.
The MMA Draw covered that story like no one else, and it still blows our mind to this day, but…
The problem is this attack doesn’t work because nobody really knows or cares about who the hell Hunter Campbell is.
All of the heat is about marketing MVP as a proxy play against UFC. Call it The Vampire Strategy if you want. The problem with this strategy, as we’ve seen over the last several years with AEW trying to gain market share from WWE, is that once the monopoly starts sucking less, then the fans you temporarily won over will go right back home to Daddy.
MVP needs to establish and build its own identity. They cannot simply be seen as a one-and-done content mercenary for Netflix. Building a brand takes time. It takes meticulous work.
As crafty as Jake Paul & Nakisa Bidarian are, you never are quite sure what side of the fence they are on from day to day. It’s scheme after scheme, trying to find a way to establish a foothold while also holding out a possibility of eventually cementing a cold peace with TKO in certain battlegrounds — like boxing, where Zuffa Boxing will have a men’s UBO, and MVP will potentially have a path to run a women’s UBO.
Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano will attract eyeballs, but there is no conclusive or satisfactory finish for the fight other than someone getting knocked out or their arm ripped out of the socket.
Rousey says she will not be fighting after this bout. Ditto for Carano.
So, what is left for MVP to build up?
Forgetting about Francis Ngannou
What, you didn’t know he was fighting on this weekend’s Netflix card?
We don’t blame you. There is zero heat for his upcoming fight against Philipe Lins (who?).
MVP posted on Twitter about Mr. Ngannou’s arrival in Los Angeles on Sunday, and it landed with a thud. Less than 5,000 impressions.
Let’s say Ngannou hypothetically wins. Then what?
The UFC had a chance to build a division around Francis Ngannou, and they passed.
PFL had a chance to build around Francis Ngannou, and it seemed perfunctory, a lone bout against forgettable opposition that was completely overshadowed by Francis’ brief boxing career and personal tragedies.
What do you do with Ngannou if you are MVP?
The Heavyweight division in UFC is slightly improving, but it is still really dire. Who are the hot prospects and free agents available to build a couple of mega-fights with Ngannou?
Jon Jones is locked up in the UFC prison. As is Alex Pereira, who recently signed an 8-fight deal to keep him locked in the Octagon. Prospect Gable Steveson just signed with the UFC, too.
Jake Paul revealed this week — in an interview with Ariel Helwani — that there is a fair chance he will not be able to fight anymore due to complications from jaw surgery after getting blasted by Anthony Joshua last December. Talk about the best advertisement ever for AJ’s career.
If you can’t build a next event around fights — or preparing fans to paint their own portrait to dream about what matches they want to see moving forward — then you are left marketing celebrity and sizzle. Jake and Nakisa are very good at that, but they have made one very curious decision that cuts both ways.
Helwani the Heater
Heelwani… or Hellwani?
Choose your own adventure on this one.
MVP decided to go all-in with Ariel Helwani as the lead media voice/hype man on both Netflix & ESPN.
With legacy websites like BoxingScene recently firing staff writers, Helwani’s Uncrowned website + social media video platform (backed by Apollo Global Management) is concentrating its power in the combat sports space.
Ariel’s fingerprints are all over MVP advertising and marketing. Take a look at this recent MVP poster for the “MVP MMA House” of influencers.
It’s almost like Ariel Helwani sees himself as the star of the MMA movie in his mind, and yours.
It’s almost like Ariel Helwani sees himself as big — if not bigger — than the fighters on the card.
True to form, Ariel Helwani is relishing his role in multiple supersized controversies. Eric Bischoff is an inspiration to him, and so is Bischoff’s famous book, Controversy Creates Cash.
When Nate recently wrote about Sean Strickland’s completely fake and phony race-baiting gimmick at UFC 328, Ariel Helwani took the argument one step further. Except he managed to take an appropriate argument and twist it in a way that the controversy became about Ariel himself.
Dana White’s favorite muse, Nina Drama, went on the attack.
My response to Ariel Helwani -The entire fight week you chastised Sean and made it a point to talk about how he went “too far” how you didn’t agree with what he was saying in the press conferences and now you’re upset he apologized? Being a man is also taking accountability for what you say when you’re wrong and Sean is man enough to do that and he did it on a world stage. In a time when we need less division ESPECIALLY with the HUMAN RIGHTS CRISIS going on between Israel and Palestine wouldn’t you want to see two people of separate beliefs and religion come together and make amends? And now you make a joke of it? And let’s not forget, things were said on both sides and in the end all you saw was love and respect between Sean and Khamzat. Two absolute warriors making peace after one of the biggest blood wars in the last decade … weird hill to die on Ariel.
And this is where the Ariel Helwani story takes a very uncomfortable twist in 2026. His uncle is the famous Zionist professor Gad Saad in Montreal.
In December 2023, Gad Saad posted an inflammatory item on Twitter identifying “Roscoe from Arkansas” as one of the biggest hypothetical threats to Jewish people.
Little did we know that Bryce Mitchell would soon arrive. The same Bryce Mitchell whom UFC fans turned into a babyface against Israeli flag-waving Brazilian Jean Silva in Miami for UFC 314. The same Bryce Mitchell that The MMA Guru took fishing in a popular episode of his show.
The post-October 7th (2023) political environment has really complicated matters politically for our favorite MMA talking head. Ariel Helwani is getting heat from all sides.
The UFC bro-voting 18-to-34-year-old male audience isn’t all that down with Israel, which Ari Emanuel found out the hard way.
The same UFC online boot-lickers who proclaim to hate Luke Thomas don’t seem to mind so much when it comes to Luke criticizing Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sean Strickland’s gimmick is preposterous and deserves to be called out. His clown nose on, clown nose off routine is exhausting. When Strickland thinks he’s losing his audience, he busts out an AIPAC joke about his busted-up and swollen nose.
This conflict between UFC fighters + terminally online fans and Ariel Helwani over his support for Israel has spiraled way out of control.
Former UFC Welterweight champ Belal Muhammad, a Palestinian-American Chicago native, has been savaging Helwani, calling him out for supporting genocide and war crimes. Ali Abdelaziz has also jumped into the fray.
“Stay in your lane. You are someone who is bought and paid for. That’s why you cannot get access to UFC events."
“You are a traitor and a piece of shit.”
(I guess Ali has time to get into flame wars but not enough time to produce discovery in the ongoing UFC antitrust litigation. I digress.)
Bottom line? There is more heat for Ariel Helwani heading into MVP’s Netflix MMA debut than there is for most of the fighters on the card.
Which is shocking, considering one of the top MVP fights has two legendary brawlers.
No one cares about Nate?
No, not our Nate. We’re talking about Nate Diaz, one of the most legendary agents of violence in the history of modern Mixed Martial Arts.
That guy. Facing off against the king of Bare Knuckle fighting, Platinum Mike Perry.
A fight with a reported purse of $10 million. And yet, very few people are talking about a fight that looks like a potential barn-burner on paper.
Even Ariel Helwani and Nate Diaz barely talked about Saturday’s fight when they sat down for a one-on-one:
And Nate spent most of the “Fighting Mike Perry” section bitching about grapplers he faced in the UFC rather than talking about Mike Perry.
True to the themes of this article, Nate Diaz also sounded really old.
That says it all.
Hidden gems low on the card
Dylan Knostman did a worthy post on the prospects on the MVP-Netflix card, claiming “the three highest level matchups (on the card all feature) fighters that could arguably be top of the division in any promotion around the world.”
He calls out Jason Jackson vs Jeff Creighton, Adriano Moraes vs Phumi Nkuta, and Salahdine Parnasse vs Kenny Cross, and adds:
…former Bellator champion Jason Jackson (is facing) TUF veteran and top California prospect “Jazzy” Jeff Creighton (who’s stepping in on short notice to replace veteran Lorenz Larkin).
But then Knostman gives the game away as regards why Jackson is on this card instead of fighting for TKO in the UFC:
Despite nearing the end of his career, Jackson is without a doubt still one of the most difficult welterweights to matchup against in the world.
Oh, okay. How bout that Moraes vs Nkuta bout?
Former UFC fighter Mohammed Mokaev was slated to face former ONE championship champion Adriano Moraes, but Visa issues forced Mokaev out of this bout. To replace him, MVP tracked down Phumi “Turbo” Nkuta, who is another one of the top flyweights in the world.
Adriano Moraes built his name on the trilogy with all time great Demetrious Johnson in ONE championship, where he went 1-2 in the series.
Flyweights, short-notice substitute. One of them lost a threefer with DJ. Got it.
Fingers crossed for Parnasse vs Cross:
This fight is without a doubt one of the best fights booked in the year 2026. Salahdine Parnasse is perhaps the best lightweight in the world aside from Ilia Topuria, and he gets his chance to prove it on an international stage against a tough opponent in Kenny Cross. Cross is coming off winning the Tuff n Uff Lightweight championship, and has established himself as one of the top fighters in North America.
Salahdine Parnasse is truly a one of a kind athlete in mixed martial arts. Many have called him the Mbappe of MMA, which shows just how highly his own country of France regards his skills.
…the UFC had offered (Parnasse) a contract, but it was financially far inferior to what he was making for KSW, which was rumored at nearly €500k per fight. With their permission, he was allowed to leave and fight for MVP on Netflix, allowing his star to shine on a truly global stage.
That’s one out of three real fights on the MVP-Netflix card that has undeniable interest and import.
Seems like Ariel Helwani should spend more time talking up Salahdine Parnasse and Kenny Cross rather than pushing rope uphill with a visibly bored Nate Diaz.
Hopefully, Rousey-Carano isn’t a missed opportunity
This card has the sizzle of Ronda Rousey’s return, topped with Gina Carano’s comeback.
It’s got the steak of Parnasse vs. Cross, plus the lineal heavyweight MMA champion Francis Ngannou.
MVP should be able to succeed, but… with Ronda Rousey and Jake Paul likely retiring, there’s no obvious follow-up headliner for their next event, and they need at least a half-dozen to build something serious with Parnasse.
Sadly, it seems Francis Ngannou fighting MMA bouts against unknown opposition is never going to be a mainstream draw. His detour into boxing might have made him a well-earned fortune, but it permanently derailed interest in his MMA career.
A career that saw Francis Ngannou crowned the best of the best in the biggest weight class in the world’s top MMA organization.
A career that never saw him forced to pass on that crown to a worthy successor who beat him in the cage.
Kind of a drag that we never got and never will get Ngannou vs. Jon Jones, but I sure would like to see MVP make something out of the incredible MMA talent that doesn’t fit TKO’s business model.
Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded BloodyElbow.com in 2007 and sold it in 2024.
Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.
The truth hurts. Very well done article yet again. Part of me is thinking that Ronda is saying it’s her final fight to try to get more eyeballs to watch and another reason other than the fighter pay point.
Thanks for including some of my work! Definitely some things to look forward to on this card, but overall I agree with the sentiment, this card has left a lot to be desired in the promotional angle, and they’ve chosen to basically ignore the actual best fighters and fights on this event