2 weeks Ago
Professional Fighters League founder and president Donn Davis wants it known that his organization and the UFC are the two MMA promotions that make up a global "duopoly" in the sport. Quite honestly, with the gains the PFL have made with their acquisition of Bellator and the signing of top prospects like Paul Hughes and Dakota Ditcheva and established free agents like Francis Ngannou, it's hard to argue against his claims. I spoke with Davis on Friday, and we discussed the PFL's past, present, and future.
"When you and I first started talking six years ago, we had a great vision to bring meritocracy and transparency to the sport, put the fighters in the center, they win, they advance," Davis said to me during our Zoom interview. "It's not promoter driven. Well, six and a half years later, it's now UFC and PFL, it's a duopoly.
There is no number three, number four and number five and couple clear metrics behind that. If you took the top 300 fighters in the world by Fight Matrix rankings, the only independent ranking service, UFC has 190 of the top 300, PFL has 90 of the top 300 fighters. So if you took all other hundred MMA companies in the world, they have 20 together.
So what's very, very cool. UFC has twice as many events a year as PFL. They have 40, we have 20, so they're double the number of top 300 fighters as ours really means we have about the same equal star fighters.
" The PFL absorbed Bellator and its roster with the acquisition in late 2023, and now the former boasts a roster that includes Ngannou, Renan Ferreira, AJ McKie, Cris Cyborg, Larissa Pacheco, Johnny Eblen, Impa Kasanganay and others. The PFL also has distribution through ESPN DAZN in Europe, and replay options are available on Hulu and other platforms. "There's never been a sports league that has equal fighter talent," Davis said.
"Most people think big and little or superior and junior. Now we know our brand isn't as big as theirs, Brian. We understand that we have brand work to do.
We're six years old, but the first bullet point I would give fans from zero fighters six years ago, we now have that level quality. Second thing is distribution. We're on ESPN primetime in the United States.
We're primetime on linear and streaming in 170 countries with 20 premium distribution partners. Most of our fights are free to watch a third of their fights you got to pay for. And then the last thing I would leave people with is viewership.
This year we are about 40% of UFC's viewership. How could this be? Nobody's heard of the PFL brand yet, and we're still young and we don't have marketing money. So we do about 500,000 total viewers in the United States per event.
That's linear and streaming added together. UFC does about 1.1 million viewers per event, linear and streaming in the United States.
So PFL in just six years has gone from zero viewers to a half million viewers per event and we're growing faster than them." The upcoming PFL Superfights PPV will be the first of its kind for the promotion, and if all goes as planned, it could elevate the brand even more. I asked Davis about fighter pay, specifically Ngannou, Cyborg, and Pacheco, who are reportedly set to make massive paydays for their fights at Battle of the Giants on October 19.
"Yeah, look, 50% of our costs of this fight is to the fighters," Davis said. "We have said on pay-per-view, Superfights, 50% of the revenue, not the profit, not Hollywood accounting; 50% of the revenue would go to the fighters and that's what we're delivering on this card overall." According to Davis, the PFL has plans to continue its expansion with new fighter signings in 2025, and he also mentioned the brand would begin exploring the possibilities of a PFL video game next year as well.
It will be interesting to see how that is approached and if the PFL will continue to carve a more significant niche in the market than they have in the six years since it launched..
