During a conversation on Theo Von’s podcast, Jake Paul made a claim about the state of MMA, arguing that the sport has a fundamental problem at its core that boxing simply does not share.
“MMA hasn’t stood the test of time because the best people in the sport become wrestlers and they just like hold on,” Paul told Von, drawing a clear distinction between the two combat sports.
He was not referring to professional wrestling in the WWE sense, but rather athletes who rely heavily on grappling and takedowns, turning bouts into grinding ground-based contests that he believes fail to entertain audiences.
Paul went further, putting the sport’s trajectory into historical perspective. He said, “Boxing has been around since the 1500s. MMA is 30 years and it’s declining.”
Paul pointed to names like Khabib Nurmagomedov and Islam Makhachev as examples of elite athletes whose wrestling-dominant styles, while technically effective, do not translate into the kind of compelling viewing that keeps a sport growing over generations.
Beyond the stylistic critique, Paul also took aim at how the UFC is currently managed, arguing that corporate priorities have overtaken the athlete-first mentality that once drove the promotion’s growth.
“Their investors have gotten greedy. They’re looking at the P&Ls and being like, we can just keep pumping this. They forgot their heart as a company,” he said.
He backed that claim with revenue figures, contrasting the UFC’s pay model against the NFL’s.
He noted, “The NFL pays their athletes 50% of the revenue. In the UFC, it’s 150 million out of a billion. But when you exclude Conor McGregor and Jon Jones from that, it becomes like 5%, 50 million out of a billion.”
Paul also weighed in on the UFC’s new partnership structure, noting that the organization being publicly traded and aligned with Paramount places it in a very different position from his own Most Valuable Promotions, which operates with Netflix and, by his account, without the pressure of outside shareholders dictating terms.
“When they’re paying athletes like 15% of the revenue, by the way down to 10%, the investors are going to be like, yeah, we’re going to make more money,” he said.
