The MMA general news, events and thoughts thread

[Cousin Jim Bob]

1 hour ago, Bruce85 said:

Sure Dana will go crying to his orange faced overlord and beg him to sweep this under the rug. 
 

Will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere! 

 

There has just been a huge NBA betting scandal involving the mafia. It had links to big name players and managers.

The mafia are apparently still all over sports betting/fixing in the US. It wouldn't surprise me with how murky MMA is, that they are all over this.

Edited November 2, 2025 by Cousin Jim Bob

[jimufctna24]

Also, there is a clear incentive for some fighters to co-operate. Some are poorly paid and have little chance of climbing the rankings.

Thus, their best chance of making serious money is to exploit the betting industry.

Something similar has been occurring in darts in recent years.

Edited November 2, 2025 by jimufctna24

[jimufctna24]

14 hours ago, Bruce85 said:

 

Will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere! 

Already appears to be.

 

 

[wandshogun09]

I’m just gonna go ahead and decide that Amanda Nunes’ losing to Julianna Pena was a fix. It’s the only logical explanation.

Same goes for any other fight I didn’t like the result of. 

[Dai]

For some reason I was flicking through the Reyes/Ulberg show from a few weeks back. If you have Fight Pass then go and watch the opener on the main card, the Tom Nolan/Charlie Campbell fight, with this betting pattern news in your mind. I checked to see what Wand wrote about it in the event thread (before this news broke) and annoyingly its literally the only show I dont think youve ever done a full breakdown on, so no thoughts were given to that fight.

Edited November 5, 2025 by Dai

[jimufctna24]

On 11/2/2025 at 9:23 PM, jimufctna24 said:

Also, there is a clear incentive for some fighters to co-operate. Some are poorly paid and have little chance of climbing the rankings.

Thus, their best chance of making serious money is to exploit the betting industry.

Something similar has been occurring in darts in recent years.

To add further to this.

Apparently a fighter has revealed they were offered 70k to take a dive. For fighters on 10-12k to show and an additional 10-12k to win, it's not difficult to see why such offers would be tempting to them, especially for fighters with limited potential to climb the ranks and secure a more lucrative contract or with financial issues. A guaranteed 80k-82k to play ball as opposed to 10-24k to fight honestly.

Edited November 5, 2025 by jimufctna24

[wandshogun09]

4 hours ago, Dai said:

I checked to see what Wand wrote about it in the event thread (before this news broke) and annoyingly its literally the only show I dont think youve ever done a full breakdown on, so no thoughts were given to that fight.

I do that from time to time. Usually when I’ve either skipped a few fights or just don’t have anything to really say about a certain fight. I know I watched Nolan vs Campbell because it was a fight I was quite looking forward to but I mustn’t have thought there was anything particularly noteworthy about it if I didn’t post about it. I remember that Perth card being one I really wasn’t arsed about as well so chances are I did a proper vague skim through job watching it. 

[jimufctna24]

 

[Browser Brady]

2025 was the year i watched the least amount of UFC events in about 18 years of fandom…

And i’m not sure why exactly..

Not sure if its the wrestlers from Dagestan taking over or just a lack of compelling characters but i skipped one event after another this year and never really felt like i missed out.

 

 

 

 

[Dai]

Event	Main Event	Co-Main/Next Biggest
UFC 312	Du Plessis vs. Strickland 2	Zhang Weili vs. Suarez
UFC 313	Ankalaev vs. Pereira	Gaethje vs Fiziev
UFC 314	Volkanovski vs. Lopes	Silva vs. Mitchell
UFC 315	Muhammad vs. Della Maddalena	Schevchanko vs Fiorot
UFC 316	Dvalishvili vs. O’Malley 2	Kayla Harrison bout
UFC 317	Topuria vs. Oliveira	Van vs. Royval
UFC 318	Holloway vs. Poirier 3	Costa vs Kopylov
UFC 319	Du Plessis vs. Chimaev	Lerone Murphy vs Pico
UFC 320	Ankalaev vs. Pereira 2	Dvalishvili vs. Sandhagen
UFC 321	Aspinall vs. Gane	Jandiroba vs. Dern
UFC 322	Della Maddalena vs. Makhachev	Shevchenko vs. Weili
UFC 323	Dvalishvili vs. Yan 2	Pantoja vs. Van

 

 

ChatGPT gave me the following for the numbered events for 2025. Would be interesting what people would define in that lot as "Excellent/Classic", "Good" or "Instantly forgettable". I still watch everything, but not a lot registers for a prolonged period of time, and with the way the scheduling is, you move pretty quickly on to the next event, and dont think too long about your "favourite" fighters. TKO have perfected making UFC the only brand/character, and they have perfected churning out a massive amount of nondescript events that keep their viewing minutes to an absolute maximum, whilst paying the minimum to the fighters themselves. 

Edited December 29, 2025 by Dai

[Browser Brady]

It’s a shame Bellator was absorbed by the PFL . There doesn’t seem to have much happened in that regard in terms of large US events ?

 

 

Do you remember Strikeforce?

 

Now that seemed like a proper alternative..

 

They had some great fun cards. The UFC buying them was such a shrewd move .

[wandshogun09]

Bellator was a fun alternative for the first few years of its existence but the shows were dead as fuck to watch by the end. It was weird because even when they’d put a card together that looked good, it very rarely delivered on the night. It’s like Bjorn Rebney put a curse on the place when he left or something.

Strikeforce was great. WEC was awesome too. And on the Japanese side of things, while it was never the same post-Pride and none of the other promotions captured that magic, DREAM and K-1 Hero’s were very enjoyable. I don’t know what the Japanese scene is like now, I don’t follow much of Rizin and there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. In the US though, the UFC monopoly is in full effect at this point. PFL have the odd decent-good fight or show but they’re basically just last legs Bellator under a different name. They have some really good fighters but outside of something like Nemkov vs Ngannou (which we’ll hopefully see in 2026) no real appealing fights to put them in. They’ve got Dakota Ditcheva who’s genuinely one of the most promising new potential stars in the sport but not one really interesting opponent to put her against. There’s no mega fight with her to even work towards. They’ve got Usman Nurmagomedov and Paul Hughes who are both very good but they’ve already fought each other twice this year and the first fight was a legit FOTY contender for me but, whether you agreed with the decisions or not, Usman’s gone 2-0 so that rivalry is essentially done now. Everything else besides PFL stateside is either meaningless or a pure feeder league for the UFC. It actually feels like Bare Knuckle is more popular in the US now than any of the non-UFC MMA promotions. 

The only promotions I’ve seen any of which feel fresh and seem pretty healthy are European shows like Oktagon and KSW. But even them, I haven’t watched as much as I’d like just due to not having as much free time these days.

Looking at that list of numbered UFC shows from this year, without looking up the cards and just going off memory, yeah, it wasn’t a great year was it? I know there are no MMA categories in the UKFF Awards this year but if there was I’d be struggling with it this year, to be honest. Looking at those events listed, I’d say 314 was probably the best overall card of the year but even then the Volk vs Lopes main event was one-way traffic. A lot of the big main events that felt like they promised a lot going in either a) ended too early to be anything really special like Topuria vs Oliveira, b) were one-sided dominations that were boring to watch like Khamzat vs DDP or c) ended in complete anti-climax and controversy like Aspinall vs Gane. Even Fighter Of The Year would be difficult to decide this year with Merab losing the way he did right at the end of the year. 2025 was a weird one. 

[Tamura]

I haven't watched any Rizin since 2023, mainly because nobody on public torrent sites bothered to upload any and I wasn't going to fork out money to join mma-tracker (or whatever it's called these days) as a VIP member. However I have just noticed Rizin 51 from September and the Tokyo Dome show from April have been uploaded to XWT, so going to have a watch of those later. I sometimes enjoy the One Championship shows, the Friday Fights can be a bit lacking in variety at times though. Sometimes you'll get a decent mix of muay thai, kickboxing, submission grappling and MMA, and other weeks it's all muay thai so a bit samey.

[wandshogun09]

Completely forgot about ONE 🤣 but yeah, some good stuff on their shows but I find them very hit and miss. Don’t even know where you can watch them now either. Used to halfway keep up with them when a lot of their stuff was streamed on YouTube but then they started putting their shit behind a paywall, which I get from their POV, but I can’t justify paying out more for cards that are a mixed bag, with a roster I’m only half familiar with and the cards airing at weird times. 

[jimufctna24]

Japanese MMA is behind the times in terms of training and technique. This limits the appeal of MMA in Japan, as despite the likes of Sapp and Cro Cop becoming major stars in Japan in the 2000s, the Japanese prefer to see their home-grown talent thrive (similar to most nations). Foreign promotions also struggle to become popular in Tokyo, and by extension Asia, because they tend to use the cage rather than the ring, and also present MMA as cage fighting rather than as an art. Both of which turn off Japanese viewers. 

Bellator actually had the right idea in their last few years, at least in terms of putting out a viewer-friendly product. With the UFC having the majority of the sports' top talent under contract, it made sense for them to run fewer shows. They simply didn't have the talent to put out a lot of shows and for them to be watchable/relevant, which made the product very difficult to follow in the late 2010s and early 2020s (28 shows in 2019 ffs). 

As for Strikeforce, I generally enjoyed their show in the late 2000s and early 2010s (Franky Shams can fuck off nowadays, but he was a favourite of mine at the time). What I posted about Bellator in its final years very much applied to Strikeforce (fewer shows, etc), and Strikeforce even had a greater share of the world's top MMA talent at the time from what I recall. It was also appeared to be a very successful business in its own right (unlike ONE FC), as it apparently made money on all its shows barring those that featured Fedor. It was a shame that its parent company decided to focus purely on Ice Hockey and that the UFC's offer to buy it made it easy for them to sell up. 

Edited December 30, 2025 by jimufctna24