Jake Paul is coming to a cage near you — and he’s bringing a whole new promotion with him.
Mixed martial arts is getting a major shake-up in the combat sports game with some new and familiar faces taking the plunge.
When Most Valuable Promotions merged with the Professional Fighters League, many questions were answered about Jake Paul’s long-rumored venture into MMA — a sport dominated by Dana White and the UFC, though this new venture hopes to make a bit of a dent in that massive market share.
Perhaps most notably, Paul does indeed plan to fight in mixed martial arts in this new promotion that will see PFL’s name evaporate beginning in 2027 and eventually be transformed into “MVP MMA.”
“Yes, if he’s willing to do that,” PFL CEO John Martin told The Post when asked whether he will be willing to host Paul, who has admittedly never seriously trained MMA but did wrestle in high school and is an increasingly accomplished boxer. “I think that would be fantastic.”
“When [Paul] makes that decision [to fight in MMA], he is going to go all in on training,” Most Valuable Promotions co-founder Nakisa Bidarian added in the exclusive interview with The Post. “We were talking to Royce Gracie last night about him and his family becoming a part of his jiu-jitsu training. So make no mistake, when Jake Paul decides to do something, he is fully committed, and he will be very professional in how he approaches it.”
Royce Gracie, who was the winner of UFC 1, UFC 2, and UFC 4 despite being routinely outweighed by 40-plus pounds, has family all throughout the MMA world, including UFC veteran Kron Gracie.
When asked what kind of opponent Paul would command for an MMA fight, Bidarian has continued to call for former UFC lightweight and welterweight contender Nate Diaz, who is a third-degree black belt under Cesar Gracie with 20 wins inside the UFC octagon.
Though Diaz is significantly older now, at 41 years old, it appears Paul thinks he can hang with a former UFC star.
The future home of that fight — and the entire product as a whole with the merger — is the (multi) million-dollar question left to answer.
The UFC found a home at Paramount+ in a $7.7 billion deal in a massive shake up last year, and PFL’s contract rights will be an interesting one to follow with the merger.
PFL has been broadcast on ESPN since 2019, but Martin, a former television executive with Turner, told The Post that he is still frustrated with the Worldwide Leader not giving the product the push that he believes it deserves.
“[Netflix] was one of the considerations,” Martin said when asked about how important the streaming giant’s relationship to MVP was to making a deal come together. “One of the frustrations I’ve personally had in the year since I’ve been here is I think our fighters are better than the average fan realizes. We haven’t had the distribution to really be able to fully expose them. I think the relationship being under one banner and one umbrella with MVP and seeing the type of events that they could put on. Yes, Netflix is a help, but as Nakisa said, if you look at the success of MVP MMA 1, the numbers were honestly astonishing, and not every event on Netflix performs to that level.”
PFL had its biggest card of the year on July 31 and had some solid viewership numbers while being broadcast on cable television on ESPN.
PFL New York, which was headlined by Usman Nurmagomedov in the main event along with superstar Dakota Ditcheva in the co-main event, averaged 297,000 viewers on ESPN on Friday night with a peak audience of 382,000 viewers in the 8:30 p.m. quarter hour.
It’s the most-viewed of the eight PFL telecasts on ESPN or ESPN2 this year, and it’s 40 percent higher than the next-best ESPN broadcast.
PFL New York did its highest audience since August 2025 when the PFL hosted three championship fights at PFL 10 on Aug. 21.
