There is a question I keep coming back to.

Combat sports is the fastest-growing entertainment category in the world. The gyms are full. The streaming numbers are real. The culture arrived years ago. Billions of dollars flow through the sport every year.

And yet there is not a single venue in the United States built specifically to host fights the way a comedy club is built to host comedy.

Not one.

I spent 7+ years running fight leagues. Institutional capital. Global broadcast deals. Millions of followers. Before that, I competed at the world level. I have been inside this industry at almost every level it has.

And the venue problem never went away. Not once.

Here is what the average fight card actually looks like behind the scenes.

You are in a casino ballroom. It is available. The price is workable. And from the moment you sign the contract, you are solving problems the venue was never designed for. Where do the fighters warm up? There is a storage room down the hall — you are sharing it with the catering team. The walkout path from the locker room to the floor winds through a kitchen corridor. The ceiling is too low for your lighting rig so you adapt. The house sound system was built for corporate presentations. You bring your own everything, set it all up in four hours, and spend the next twelve months trying to make the footage look like it happened in a real arena.

Or you are in a convention center. Massive. Available. Technically functional. And completely impossible to fill with atmosphere. Eight hundred people in a room built for eight thousand looks like a failure on camera regardless of how loud they are. You spend the entire build trying to mask the scale with draping and lighting because the bones of the building work against you.

Or you go up market and book a real arena. Now the bones are right — the sightlines, the production infrastructure, the locker rooms. But arenas are built for hockey and basketball. You are paying for 15,000 seats and you can realistically sell 3,000 to 5,000 for most fight cards. The economics only work at the very top of the sport. For everyone else it is an empty room with great lighting.

Every single one of these is a compromise. The warmup space is improvised. The walkout is a workaround. The production is rebuilt from zero every time. And when the event ends, all of it disappears. The knowledge, the setup, the momentum — gone. Next show, you start over.

The cost isn't just operational. Sponsors treat every event like a test because they can't see consistency in the model. The audience that came once doesn't know where to find you next. Great nights don't compound into anything. The sport keeps looking smaller than it is because the venues make it look small.

The UFC solved this for themselves. The Apex exists because at a certain scale, renting stopped making sense. But it was never meant to be shared infrastructure. The events that run there — Slap Fighting, Zuffa Boxing, UFC BJJ — are all UFC-owned and operated. It is a private solution to a universal problem.

It has been tried elsewhere. Internationally, purpose-built combat sports venues do exist — Lumpinee and Rajadamnern in Thailand, Korukuen Hall in Japan. But those work because one discipline is woven into the national identity at a level that doesn't exist in the US yet. They were built around a single sport, a single culture, a single audience that was already there.

In America, every promotion outside the UFC umbrella is still making the same compromises in the same borrowed spaces. The attempts to solve it have been too narrow, too regional, or didn't survive long enough to prove the model.

Forty thousand gyms in this country where people train to fight. Zero venues built to host all of them.

That gap has been hiding in plain sight for thirty years. Not for much longer.

— Adam

P.S. If you're building in the combat sports space and want to think through the business side — reach out or apply at SKOVAX.CO​

P.P.S. Want to catch up on past newsletters? Browse the full archive HERE.

P.P.P.S. Check out my newest video on Youtube on Why Nike Sponsors Pickleball But Ignores Combat Sports → HERE​