We have an identity and an integrity problem.

Hey, it's Adam.

Saturday night, I'm on my sofa scrolling Instagram. IBF world heavyweight title fight in the UK, BKB bare-knuckle in Florida. A boxing freak show in Orlando. BKFC in Boston. Pro boxing somewhere else.

And I couldn't tell you which was which.

Same ring. Same ropes. Same ringside angle. Rainbet in the same corner. I had to check the account handle to know what I was looking at.

That's friction, on a platform where people decide in under a second whether to keep scrolling.

Let me get the easy objection out of the way first. Too many events on one night isn't the problem. There are 52 weekends in a year and more promotions launching every month, so the calendar was always going to stack. The NFL runs games at the same time. Nobody complains. And it's good that these shows go ahead on a night the big guys are running, that's a sign of health.

The problem is that when they stack, nothing separates them.

Everybody's in a ring, even some of the MMA. Everybody's got Rainbet, sometimes more visible than the promotion paying for the production. They've gone from one league to another to basically everyone in the space, and it's a smart play on their end. Somebody wrote a check and good for them.

But if a viewer's strongest visual association with your event is somebody else's logo, what did you build?

Three-or four-letter fight league, presented by Rainbet, tattooed guys punching each other between ropes. Two bare-knuckle events on the same night, both of them the biggest, both of them claiming the fastest-growing sport in the world.

Every one of them has found the metric that proves it, usually while the wide shot shows empty seats.

Then there's the other version of the identity problem. The boss.

Somewhere along the line, people decided that because Dana is famous and everyone knows Eddie Hearn, the promoter has to be the product. So now you scroll, and eight out of ten posts on a league's account are the guy who runs it. Talking to camera. Reacting to something. Being loud in a suit.

You couldn't name three fighters on that roster.

Dana earned that over decades on top of the biggest promotion in the sport. Hearn earned it with his storytelling and with actual champions. It's the output, not the strategy. Doing it in reverse just means you have a personal brand attached to a league nobody can identify.

That's the identity side. The second problem matters more.

There's effectively no barrier to entry on sanctioning anymore. Anybody with a venue and a card can run a fight show, and some of what's getting through is indefensible.

One of the Orlando shows this weekend featured a fighter with open extremist ties. Not buried on the prelims.

Somebody in that room said yes. Somebody approved the matchmaking, somebody cut the promo, somebody looked at the clip and decided the reach was worth it.

And it works, in the narrow way these things work. The algorithm doesn't separate attention from approval. A press conference scuffle outperforms a fight. A dangerous mismatch outperforms a competitive one. We've arrived at a place where if nobody shoves anybody at the presser, the presser didn't happen.

Trash talk has always been part of this business. I've sold fights with it. But it sat on top of a real matchup. Now it's the product and the fight is the afterthought.

Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud.

These decisions have names attached to them. Not "the industry." Not "the algorithm." A person with the authority to kill a fight, who didn't. A manager who took a few thousand dollars to put his guy on a show he knows is garbage.

I've watched what happens when the people holding that line leave the building. Karate Combat is not the organization I helped create. Neither is a lot of this space. The format survives the departure. The judgment doesn't. Whatever was holding the standard in place was a person, and when that person walks, the show keeps running and the floor drops.

No system protects this sport. There's a handful of promoters, matchmakers and managers who will eat a loss rather than put a fighter in something they can't defend, and there are people who won't. The second group is getting louder, better funded, and harder to tell apart from everyone else.

The distance between the top of this sport and the bottom of it isn't money, it's the number of times somebody in the room said no.

Look at what the top looks like right now. A card at the White House. MVP on Netflix. The production out of Riyadh. A real night at MSG. The gap between that and platforming a Nazi for views isn't a gap, it's a different industry. And it's worth understanding why the UFC and the big boxing promoters are where they are. It isn't luck. It's a hundred small decisions the people rushing in for virality won't make.

But when the bottom does something ugly, it gets attached to all of us. The fighters, the gyms, everyone trying to build something that outlasts a news cycle.

Combat sports are growing. I've said it and I still believe it. But don't take it for granted. Getting paid to put on fights is a privilege, and it can be taken away. Respect it.

Somebody in the room has to say no. Be that person.

Best,
Adam

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