In what was undoubtedly the most-watched combat sports event of all time, the streaming numbers of which are estimated to be roughly half of the Super Bowl’s, Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson failed to deliver much of a fight.
Paul won in boring but decisive fashion, tepidly outstriking his retirement-age opponent to a unanimous-decision win. The influencer, still a relative novice to the sport, appeared unwilling to meaningfully engage the all-time great, presumably for fear of risking a knockout to a man twice his age. The final seconds of the fight ended with Paul and Tyson meeting in the center of the ring to mercifully embrace one another in a show of respect. While it was about what you’d expect pairing a twenty-seven-year-old influencer-turned-fighter with a fifty-eight-year-old boxing legend — knee brace and all — it was a fine enough ending to an event where everyone left more or less healthy, and $20 to $40 million richer.
The influencer era is clearly here with us to stay and has already come to shape our national politics and our pastimes. Old heads will certainly pearl-clutch over the sanctity of the sport. They have a point — fights that feature influencers, retired MMA fighters, and boxing legends that qualify for Social Security are closer to circus events than representations of combat sports at their best. As for the fights themselves, they tend generally to lack excitement, and the level of skill displayed is usually unimpressive. However, what consistently impresses is the sheer spectacle and, more importantly, the number of viewers drawn to this spectacle.
Friday night’s event is, so far, the culmination of crossover boxing — a version of the sport whose modern iteration took hold back in 2017 when an online beef between influencers KSI and Joe Weller was settled in the ring. Since then, this subset of the sport has blown up, with its biggest events being on par with and even exceeding some of the most successful in boxing to date. For example, in the last decade, the second most pay-per-views (PPVs) for a fight was for another crossover boxing event, Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather.
Paul, currently the biggest star in the crossover boxing space, has been somewhat of an unlikely voice for fighter welfare.
That bout cleared an astounding four million PPVs, second only to the traditional boxing event Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao. Others — including Logan Paul’s (Jake’s brother) exhibition match with Mayweather as well as both of his fights with KSI — were all huge PPV boons that well outperformed your average boxing card, bringing in roughly one million PPVs and spawning sizable payouts for the athletes.
One reason boxing in particular offers a natural home for these events is its business model, which, in contrast to other combat sports, offers athletes the opportunity to make enormous sums of money. Despite the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) being the biggest combat sports entity in the world, the organization regularly kneecaps its fighters with long-term contracts and sponsorship exclusivity clauses, as well as holding onto nearly 90 percent of the market share in the sport. Boxing, on the other hand, is not beholden to a single promotion and sanctioning body and therefore allows its star fighters to function in a freer market, steering their own careers according to their own values and interests.
Paul, currently the biggest star in the crossover boxing space, has been somewhat of an unlikely voice for fighter welfare. He has antagonized UFC promoter Dana White by pointing out the organization’s appalling pay practices. Paul’s callouts of former UFC stars far past their prime — many never formidable fighters to begin with and some almost as old as Tyson — have become a staple of crossover boxing. One of the reasons these fighters have agreed to these bouts with Paul, despite the risks of brain damage, is the potential payouts they stand to make boxing him, which often far exceed anything they’ve been able to earn inside the Octagon. For Paul, the level of pure boxing talent he’d have to contend with is generally very low in the sport of MMA — given the fighters have to train a number of other disciplines like muay thai, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and wrestling — yet the name value of the fighters is fairly high. It’s a match made in heaven where the fighters get their paydays and Paul gets more combat sport cache.
Given the cynicism of this career trajectory, Paul’s rhetoric on labor efforts within the fighting world has been surprising but also impressive. At the start of 2022, he tweeted at UFC president White referencing his “mission to bring awareness & change to the sport’s pay & benefits” and gave White an ultimatum that he would retire from boxing and switch to UFC if his demands of an increased minimum fighter pay, 50 percent revenue split, and long-term health care provisions were not met. An offer, to be clear, White was never going to take. As it stands now, UFC minimum fighter pay sits at $12,500 a contest, the share of the revenue split between the promoter and athletes is less than 20 percent, and fighters are only covered for injuries sustained in training or competition and not once they leave the promotion, thanks to their much-disputed status as independent contractors
Paul has led by example, securing paydays for fighters on his undercards that would not have existed otherwise. For example, the co-main event on Friday, which featured Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano — a much-disputed decision win for Taylor and arguably the best event on the card — saw both fighters earn the biggest purses of their careers, and put women’s boxing on the map in a big way.
In addition, he has claimed that his “ultimate goal is to create a fighter’s union,” betting opponent and former UFC great Anderson Silva that if he won their fight, Silva would join him in the creation of a UFC fighter’s union with Silva serving as interim president. He has also called on the ten highest-paid athletes in boxing and MMA to donate money to make this happen, even stating that fighters should strike in order to get their demands met from the UFC:
It needs to be done. And it seems impossible and maybe it will be. People say “Jake, how are you going to create a fighter union? They’ll just shelf all the fighters in the fighter’s union.” No, everyone comes together and we’re not fighting. We’re not fighting. That’s how they do it. There are writers guilds, directors guilds. . . . Why can’t you donate $200,000 to the union to help pay these fighters for these six months? Are you that selfish? Floyd Mayweather, Canelo [Álvarez], who make $50 million for a fight. Canelo, you can’t donate $200,000 to this union?
Paul’s calling attention to fighter welfare has coincided with another pro-fighter movement in the sport of submission grappling I’ve covered previously. Craig Jones, a world-class competitor whose trajectory has been the polar opposite of Paul’s — leaving high-level competition for more of an influencer lifestyle himself — put on the Craig Jones Invitational tournament last year, calling attention to fighter pay in the jiu-jitsu community to astounding success. It was the most-watched event in jiu-jitsu history, some say dethroning the opposition Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) tournament for primacy of the sport’s competition future.
While combat sports and the manosphere continue to be spaces dominated by reactionary politics, they have also been the site of an awakening in labor activity in sports that for decades has had very little.
While this attention to the state of fighter treatment has been a net positive for labor, it is unclear how things may change as Paul himself further confronts the reality of organization within these sports as well as his own official transition to the promotional side of things. While his Most Valuable Promotions launched in 2021, well before his most recent efforts, it stands to reason Paul’s fighter-centric perspective may begin to shift as he adopts more of a promoter role within the sport.
The flipside is that Paul embodies a type of reactionary politics that seems to have grown particularly popular at this moment among young men. This kind of antiestablishment outsiderism allows Paul to earnestly valorize teachers and firefighters in his post-fight speech, while only days earlier endorsing Donald Trump and his nakedly pro-business agenda for president. It’s a stance shared by many of his popular post-ideological peers (e.g., Joe Rogan, et al.). While these figures have made noise about the Democratic Party’s failure to center labor, they have been unable to draw a straight line from a Trump presidency to a toothless National Labor Relations Board.
While combat sports and the manosphere continue to be spaces dominated by reactionary politics, they have also been the site of an awakening in labor activity in sports that for decades has had very little. Meaningful strides in unionization efforts will require more than a few influencers throwing their money and access around as they see fit, though for the moment, our collective cultural fixation on big names over big institutions, may just provide enough daylight to make real inroads in previously opaque spaces.
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Jack Bedrosian is a writer and performer based in Los Angeles. He has an MA in global politics from Loyola University Chicago.
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