Following successful viewership for its first MMA event on Netflix, Jake Paul’s MVP Promotions is looking to do more of them in the future.
The card—headlined by Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano and also featuring Nate Diaz-Mike Perry and Francis Ngannou-Philipe Lins—averaged 12.4 million viewers globally and 9.3 million in the U.S. on Saturday night.
“I think it was very encouraging in terms of coming into a sport where there is a massive endemic brand,” MVP’s CEO Nakisa Bidarian told Front Office Sports. “The NFL of MMA is UFC. Any time anyone’s tried to replicate viewership for the NFL or the NBA or any major sport—even LIV Golf, trying to go at PGA—you never see someone be able to achieve anything close to the viewership of that larger endemic brand. And we did that with Netflix, MVP, and the fighters involved. And when we think about the go forward, it’s just really having a more systematic approach to how we deliver MMA through hopefully Netflix on a more consistent basis.”
Bidarian was previously the CFO of UFC and helped guide its sale to WME-IMG (now Endeavor). While MVP has also been making headway in boxing—including a series of one-off Netflix fights and a deal with ESPN for women’s bouts—he sees a cleaner route toward brand development in the MMA space.
“In boxing, there’s MVP, there’s Matchroom, there’s Top Rank, there’s Queensberry, there’s Premier Boxing Championship, there’s Golden Boy. It goes on and on and on,” he said. “There’s six or seven of us that have strong brands that put on massive events at any given time. And all of us cater to the fighters.
“In MMA, there is one brand that is known to put on the biggest events. There is one brand who is known to not pay its fighters fairly. There is one brand that basically controls the ecosystem and makes it very actually clean to get involved in. That’s where the opportunity lies. And that’s where my hope is for the future.”
Nevertheless, a major hurdle for MVP is that there are not a lot of household names out there to headline their MMA cards. UFC has been very adept at locking up the prime-age fighters it wants to keep under long-term deals.
Ngannou called out Jon Jones during the MVP show on Saturday and Jones said he’d love to break his UFC contract, but that seems unlikely; he has six fights remaining on his deal with them and he hasn’t fought in over a year. Conor McGregor might be an option down the line, as said in 2024 he has two fights remaining on his UFC deal. McGregor is scheduled to face Max Holloway in July in a rematch from their 2013 bout.
Bidarian pointed to the fighters who were already on the card—Ngannou, Diaz, Perry, and Carano—as recurring draws, saying that Diaz and Perry could have a rematch and there are several opponents out there for Ngannou and Carano. Rousey emphasized after her win vs. Carano that she is retired.
“Salahdine Parnasse, who shined that night, can be a headline event in France, right?” Bidarian said. “It’s about creating the opportunities that come from these big moments. No different than Paul-Tyson putting Taylor-Serrano as the co-main, that leading to a … big event last July on an all-women’s boxing card, getting 6.4 million viewers, 4.3 million in the U .S. alone, which is bigger than any average [regular-season] NBA game, bigger than the NHL Stanley Cup Finals.”
“It’s all about how you stack these cards, get the eyeballs, and then translate it to future events. It’s not saying you’re going to put on 10, 12 events a year that are going to average 12-and-a-half million viewers. Then we’d pretty much be the NFL or college football, right? No one else does that. But can we create a product that has sustainable viewership with an ROI that makes sense for a media company? Absolutely.”
