Every fight promoter I know is obsessed with the same question: how do we look better on screen? Better cameras. Better lighting. Better broadcast deal. It's the right question for the top of the food chain. But for everyone else in this sport, I think it's the wrong thing to optimize for right now. The right question is: why would someone leave their house to be in the room? Something is happening outside of combat sports that most people in this industry aren't paying attention to. Padel...
7 days ago • 2 min read
There is a shift happening in combat sports right now that most promoters are not paying close enough attention to. The biggest names in fighting are making more money from live streams than from fighting. Arman Tsarukyan is on Kick almost every day. Rampage Jackson — a guy who does not even fight anymore — is streaming constantly and staying more relevant than half the active roster. These guys figured out that showing up on camera for four hours a day pays better and more consistently than...
15 days ago • 4 min read
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...
21 days ago • 3 min read
I became a UFC fan in 2008 and was organizing events, including MMA, by 2014. I couldn't have imagined that in 2026 we'd be talking about Netflix running its first MMA card and the UFC White House card around the corner. That's worth saying first. This moment is real. And before anything else — what MVP pulled off deserves real respect. They are a young organization. Every Jake Paul boxing event they've put together, and now this — a Netflix MMA card with legitimate production value and...
29 days ago • 6 min read
I wasn't going to write about this again. But the response to last week told me there are lessons here worth spelling out — not just for Karate Combat, but for anyone trying to build something real in this space. I posted this photo last week. Then vs. Now. Two images. No caption except "Same same but different." 2,100 likes. 164 comments. I didn't need to say anything else. The comments said it for me. "It was an honour to fight for Karate Combat when it was still about karate and not a...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
I stayed mostly quiet for two and a half years. Partly because I didn't want to be the guy who got pushed out and couldn't stop talking about it. Partly because there are legal matters I'm not in a position to discuss. But this weekend was the moment I decided silence wasn't doing anyone any favors. Last weekend's Karate Combat fight week didn't surprise me. It was the pattern finally catching up with itself. If you missed it, KC61 saw two separate brawls: as a result, a canceled main-event...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
A few weeks ago I wrote about the fact that combat sports — the fastest growing sport in the world — has no permanent home. 40,000 gyms in the US where people train to fight. Zero venues built to host them. That piece got a lot of responses. Most said the same thing — I've been saying this for years. So here's the next question. Say you build the permanent venue. Purpose-built. Right infrastructure. Proper warmup rooms, walkout staging, cameras in the walls. Everything the borrowed spaces...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
The Borrowed Faces Trap There is a loophole in most fighter contracts. It doesn't cover wrestling. Or BJJ. Or freestyle grappling. Only MMA. Only striking. That loophole is now a business model. RAF — a new freestyle wrestling promotion — is building its cards around active UFC fighters. Arman Tsarukyan. Henry Cejudo. Uriah Faber, now Khamzat Chimaev. Some of them still under UFC contract. Still competing in the octagon. Legally showing up on someone else's card because the UFC never thought...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Before we get into fight business — a personal moment. I hope you'll don't mind. I'm Hungarian. Born and raised. Yesterday, Péter Magyar's Tisza Party ended Viktor Orbán's 16-year government in a landslide — the highest voter turnout in Hungary's post-Communist history. I welcome the change, and I'm proud of the Hungarian people. Orbán did real things for sport in Hungary. Infrastructure, investment, visibility — that part is fair to acknowledge. But he and the boys ran a corrupt government...
2 months ago • 3 min read