The Professional Fighters League kicks off its 2025 campaign on Saturday with a Champions Series Event in Dubai. Major changes have taken place within the company and for that I can only say, it’s about time.
Usman Nurmagomedov will face Paul Hughes in the main event on Saturday, with Vadim Nemkov will take on veteran Tim Johnson in the co-main.
From a competition standpoint, the most notable change will be that elbows are permitted in all PFL events. It’s not really the same game without elbows, but elbows were problematic for the PFL in the past because of its season format.
Fighters often get cut, frequently badly, when they are elbowed in the head. When the winner of a fight needs to be able to come back in a short period of time to be in the next round of the tournament, it didn’t make sense to allow elbows. But banning the elbows also made it less of a compelling product.
So, credit the PFL management for recognizing that and permitting elbows.
That’s not all that is different with the PFL. It acquired the Bellator brand in late 2023, but in an egregiously bad decision, ran it separately in 2024 instead of folding the fighters it had just acquired into the PFL. The result was that Bellator was just about invisible and lost much of its good will and following.
The PFL had a solid roster in 2024, but adding the Bellator talent to it would have made it that much better. Nurmagomedov is the Bellator lightweight champion and Nemkov is its former light heavyweight champ who is now competing at heavyweight.
Both are excellent fighters and would be legitimate contenders in the UFC.
The season format in the PFL is problematic, though. The PFL tried to compare it to the uber-popular NCAA Division I basketball tournament, but that was always a massive stretch, at best. The basketball tournament was played over three weeks, not over four-to-six months, and the match-ups were always different.
In the PFL, the same fighters frequently met and there was little suspense. It was hard to follow over time.
Tournaments have not historically worked in combat sports. Even in boxing, when NBC broadcast “The Contender” in the early part of this century, fans weren’t into it.
There is a small pocket of fans who enjoy the tournament format, but the majority have shown indifference, at best, to it. In order to grow, you have to put out a product the fans are interested in, and doing the tournament just took away from that.
The goal should be to make the best fight the best as often as possible while committing to making even matches. If someone is the 12th best fighter in a weight class, pit them against No. 11. Styles come into play, but doing that more often than not makes the matches more competitive. Pitting No. 1 against No. 12 simply isn’t that compelling very often in fighting.
So while PFL is not fully abandoning the tournament, it is going to crown champions, which is another excellent decision by its management. There will be a tournament, but it’s going to be an adjunct to the regular cards and not necessarily the company’s entire focus.
So much time was spent by PFL management comparing itself to the UFC — on LinkedIn, so many posts referred to the PFL as the “co-leader” in MMA, which is as laughable as the Pittsburgh Pirates referring to themselves as co-leaders in Major League Baseball with the Los Angeles Dodgers — that it became a joke among insiders.
The PFL now has more quality fighters than any promotion but the UFC. There is a spot for it and a need for it in the marketplace, but it’s insulting the fans to try to suggest its anywhere near on the level of the UFC.
In just one of what could be thousands of examples, the PFL did two pay-per-view cards in 2024. The total number of buys combined for those shows was less than the sell-out attendance of 18,370 at The Intuit Dome for UFC 311 last week.
Those 2024 pay-per-views the PFL did are the best fights it could make with the best fighters the promotion has, but they were summarily rejected by the marketplace.
A lot of that comes down to inept p.r. and marketing. Dealing with the media is only one small part of a quality p.r. and marketing campaign, but the PFL was horrendous in that. It’s far easier to gain interviews with UFC fighters, who are in much greater demand, than it is to get a PFL fighter or executive.
Then, go to the PFL home page. It is staging a major fight on Saturday, but you’re greeted by news of the tournament that A) doesn’t begin until April and B) isn’t the company’s focal point. Why isn’t Saturday’s fight card, which features some great talent like Nurmagomedov and Nemkov, all over the front page?
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The PFL homepage as of Jan. 21, 2025
The fighters on Saturday’s card deserve far better than that.
For a long time, I thought it was just me, but I spoke to many colleagues in the MMA journalism space, both from major, recognizable sites and from smaller ones, and they reported the same bad experience.
The focus going forward for the PFL has to be three-fold:
• Sign the best fighters possible and compete for the prime talent.
• Scrap the tournaments entirely and make the best matches that can be made for each show.
• Get your act together and promote aggressively.
It’s not rocket science. They don’t need to compare themselves to the UFC. Talking about the UFC takes focus away from telling the stories of their fighters, and that’s a loss whenever they do it.
Do your best to get the stories out of your fighters. Be creative. PFL owner Donn Davis is right when he says that there is a market for MMA beyond the UFC. He needs to try to capture that market by doing the things that appeal to it.
What is going on now isn’t working. Absorbing the Bellator fighters onto the PFL roster is a great step. Matchmaking is critical, and having Nemkov fight someone like Johnson shouldn’t be the co-main event on a major show on Saturday.
Johnson’s best days are long behind him. Nemkov is a -1350 favorite Saturday at DraftKings sportsbook. The season opener should kick off with a bang, but this is a mismatch of epic proportions in the co-main event of the first show. How is that allowed to happen?
MMA is growing, but it’s a fast-moving train. The PFL executives need to hop on that train and get it going in the right direction before it’s too late.