The Floodgates Are Open

Something that started over twenty years ago is finally hitting its tipping point. And in the last two weeks alone, the signals have been impossible to ignore.

Scott Coker — the man who built Strikeforce and ran Bellator for a decade — just raised $60 million for a new MMA promotion. Tony Hawk is one of the investors. Think about that name for a second. Tony Hawk isn't a combat sports guy. He's a cultural icon who spent thirty years understanding how action sports go mainstream. When someone like that writes a check into MMA, it's not a bet on a sport — it's a bet on a moment.

The UFC White House event is weeks away. Reports are putting the spend at around $30 million for a single show. This is a sitting US President hosting a combat sports event. That sentence would have sounded insane ten years ago.

And last weekend, the UFC hosted Adin Ross's BrandRisk event at the META / UFC Apex. Influencer and creator boxing, co-branded with the UFC — Dana White there, Hunter Campbell there, UFC champions in the building. That wasn't a charity event. That was the UFC deliberately pulling a completely different audience into their orbit. Dana has always understood this. The nail boards. The way he introduced an entire generation of podcasters and influencers to Trump before anyone else was thinking about it. He knows that the people who can't fight are sometimes the biggest door-openers in the sport. BrandRisk getting the Apex treatment is the same instinct. You can argue about the fights — but the audience crossover is real and it matters.

Now zoom out.

The Netflix MMA card numbers came in. Somewhere between 12 and 17 million views. And predictably, everyone spent the week arguing about whose win it was — the UFC for building those fighters, Netflix for the distribution, MVP for executing. That argument is missing the actual story.

Here's what I think nobody fully processed: Netflix may have just discovered the cheapest large-scale attention available in sports.

If they wanted to buy into the NFL, they're writing billion-dollar checks for rights someone else built over decades. Same with NBA, Formula One, tennis, any of it. But MMA? The IP isn't locked up. There's no cartel controlling the rights. No billion-dollar gate. They partnered with a relatively small promotion, executed at a high level, and reached every household on earth. Then hundreds of millions of additional views across social media — essentially free.

No other sport offers that math. Not even close. And the kicker is I don't think they fully understood what they were buying when they signed the deal.

I've been saying this for a long time. Built businesses around this conviction — online magazine, apparel, getting the UFC onto Hungarian sports TV, building fight promotions because I believed the world would eventually catch up. Then Karate Combat. Then Dirty Boxing. The thesis has always been the same: full-contact combat sports are the most scalable attention asset in entertainment. It just needed the right distribution at scale to prove it.

Now every major network is watching. Once Netflix moves, the others can't afford to ignore it. The dam doesn't just crack — it breaks.

The boxing world isn't slowing down either, but it keeps doing boxing things. The Egypt card last weekend ended in a controversy nobody could agree on — Rico Verhoeven against Usyk, one of the greatest boxers alive, and the decision left everyone arguing. Combat sports audiences are sophisticated now. They've seen enough judging chaos and promotional politics. MMA looks cleaner by comparison. That's not a small thing when you're trying to convert new fans.

Here's what I keep coming back to.

All of this money, all of this distribution, all of these new audiences — it raises the bar for everyone in the space. The production expectations just got reset publicly. The infrastructure gap between what Netflix and MVP put on screen and what a regional or mid-tier promotion can produce just got bigger and more visible.

The promotions that figure out how to show up consistently at that level — with the right foundation underneath them — are the ones that are going to matter.

I've been working on something in this space for a while now. I've hinted at it in past issues. Every week I see more proof the problem I'm building around is real, it's urgent, and nobody else is solving it the right way.

Not ready to name it yet. But soon.

The moment is here. The money is real. The audiences are real.

The only question is who builds the right foundation to capture it.

— 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. If you're a fighter trying to figure out how to actually get paid in this sport, I put together a framework for exactly that. Get it at getpaidtofight.com​

P.P.P.S. Browse the full newsletter archive HERE. ​