Why PFL is in need of a drastic overhaul if it hopes to compete with UFC after seemingly disastrous 2024

It was one year ago at this time that the fortunes of PFL’s future appeared to change for good as the anticipation of a make-or-break 2024 began to really take hold.  

PFL announced last November it had acquired the roster and brand name of Bellator MMA to merge with its rapidly growing stable, which had already received a major upgrade months earlier with the electic signings of former UFC champion Francis Ngannou, YouTube superstar and combat sports disruptor Jake Paul and a pair of women’s boxing stars in Amanda Serrano and Savannah Marshall. 

It wasn’t long before PFL founder Donn Davis began announcing to the world that his promotion wasn’t just here to achieve universal acclaim as the decided No. 2 to UFC’s stranglehold on the industry, but that the home of “SmartCage” was expecting to compete on equal terms with Dana White and the world famous Octagon. 

But as we near the close of the calendar year just days out from PFL’s 2024 World Championship card, which emanates Friday afternoon from King Saud University Stadium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, it’s not difficult to surmise that PFL came up short in its intentions and doesn’t appear to be even trending in the right direction of their outsized claims. 

Despite touting six title bouts, PFL’s championship pay-per-view event has failed to make waves beyond the inner circle of hard-core MMA fans and the previous 12 months have featured an incredibly unbalanced mix of good and bad developments. 

As far as the good is concerned, PFL started the new year on a decent note with a February “PFL vs. Bellator” PPV card in Riyadh, featuring a slew of fresh and creative matchups. There was also the well-matched “PFL Super Fights: Battle of the Giants” PPV in October, also presented in Saudi Arabia thanks to the Kingdom’s large financial investment in the promotion, which saw Ngannou dominantly win his long-awaited PFL debut. 

But it’s difficult to overlook the bad that took place, as well. 

Kayla Harrison, arguably the promotion’s biggest name, left for UFC (and became an instant title contender). Neither Paul nor Serrano ever made an appearance inside the cage. Women’s MMA legend and pioneer Cris Cyborg spent most of the year complaining about not being able to get a fight date. And Ngannou, despite finally appearing, did so some 17 months after initially signing with the promotion while he competed elsewhere in professional boxing (going 0-2, including a devastating knockout loss to Anthony Joshua in February). 

Then there was the general apathy toward the promotion from MMA fans, which only appeared to grow as the year wore on (especially after PFL brass continued to paint a public message of positivity and record growth that felt delusional, at best). Not to mention, former Bellator champion Gegard Mousasi filed a lawsuit against PFL for breach of contract in October. 

Over the past week, the court of public opinion was only given more fuel to question PFL’s handling of its new era when multiple Bellator champions aggressively spoke out against the promotion’s forced inactivity and lack of communication. This, after a year where many big-name Bellator fighters were already left feeling ostracized by being kept away from the PFL main roster while being added to below-the-radar Bellator shows around the globe lacking any semblance of promotion or importance.  

The reality for PFL is that it doesn’t need a string of minor changes to dramatically shift its future as much as it might need a complete overhaul of everything from its structural foundation to the idealism behind each of its major decisions. 

For a promotion attempting to compete head-to-head with the most successful combat sports company on the globe, PFL first needs to prove it can sell tickets to live events consistently (which appears to have become an afterthought thanks to the cushion of foreign investment capital) before it can continue to make any large claims about where it stands on the promotional totem pole.

But for PFL to truly prevent this runaway train from crashing and burning like so many hopeful UFC competitors of time past, many of which avoided the kind of boastful talk that Davis and company can’t stop prophetizing (including that PFL has become the soccer equivalent of the Champions League of MMA), it should strongly consider a few necessary and immediate changes. 

1. Stop building horizontally and focus on vertically

If you watch enough cooking shows aimed at the dramatic restoration of failing restaurants, it’s not hard to remember that the first resuscitation move is almost always aimed at streamlining the menu. What good is it to boast at the amount of things you can make moderately well compared to focusing on simplifying items down to the things you do great and that are in a high demand. Part of PFL’s “Champions League of MMA” philosophy has been the creation of six feeder promotions across the globe. And that doesn’t take into account PFL’s three main brands, which includes its regular season/playoff tournaments, its Super Fights PPV division and the aforementioned Bellator International Champions Series. Considering the fact that each sub-banner employs its own roster of fighters, the overkill is maddening. 

PFL, in totality, has many assets worth watching but has them so spread out unnecessarily across multiple brands that all it has done is dilute the product and confuse new fans. From the standpoint of building a longterm business plan, PFL has been impressive at how much it has done in so little time over the past two years. But attempting to do so before its main brand has actually become successful enough to call it a legitimate competitor to the top dog is the definition of putting the cart before the horse. Davis can brag all he wants about how well his roster compares with that of UFC when it comes to the amount of fighters ranked in the top 30 of their division globally. But what good is that for the PFL when said roster is split across so many brands (which makes it even more maddening to find out so many Bellator veterans were only able to get one fight in 2024). The first move of order, without question, for PFL would be to combine all of its top talent and place it under the same banner. That’s the only way to have a prayer of ever denting the UFC’s dominant control. 

2. Drop the regular season and playoff format

Ever since Davis launched PFL in 2018 after acquiring the World Series of Fighting roster and bringing in former NFL executive Peter Murray as CEO, the promotion has made its unique model of being the only combat sports league to run under an annual regular season, playoffs and championship model as its calling card. And make no mistake about it, the fact that PFL offers a $1 million prize each year to the winner of each divisional tournament is probably its best attractive feature to potential free agents. But the season model is a physical grind that is held down by its own pitfalls, which are only exacerbated by PFL’s decision to keep so many of its bigger names away from the format. Tournament finalists must compete a total of four times over a grueling seven-month period, which would be a non-starter for many. It’s also difficult to keep the brackets intact over the course of a season given injuries and drug suspensions. And even though the concept is both unique and easy to grasp for crossover fans of team sports, it’s not considered all that much of a revelation to MMA fans. PFL should consider adopting Bellator’s old strategy of annual tournaments with no set end dates in different divisions at different times (especially when a deep roster would command such treatment). But more than anything, PFL’s best chance of making noise against UFC would actually come from keeping things as simple as possible and allowing its biggest names to be as active as possible, all in the name of chasing the title atop their own division. Making the claim, for example, that PFL has a deeper amount of elite talent as UFC in any given weight division would be an argument much easier had (and believed) if PFL actually consolidated its talent into the same banner and format. 

3. Get rid of the fake and duplicate titles

Do you know what lapsed or casual boxing fans often bring up as a major reason why it’s so difficult to lend your time and energy to following the sport? It’s the fact that there are so many world champions per weight class, so many recognized sanctioning bodies and so many bootleg or secondary titles presented as having value. That’s exactly what PFL has done in 2024. There are PFL regular season and playoff champions (which comes with a belt). There are Bellator champions. And then there are fighters who appear almost exclusively on PFL’s burgeoning move into PPV who fight for the completely absurd Super Fight titles. And remember that fun PPV earlier this year when Bellator and PFL fighters faced one another? Yeah, the winners of those fights got belts, too. The larger idea here goes hand-in-hand with PFL’s need to consolidate its rosters. But a large reason why that’s so important is because championships often make stars for promotions like PFL that are so desperately trying to create a stable of their own. But if your title has no value because everyone gets one, what do you really have? Again, it would be a lot easier for PFL to push the agenda for having the best in the world in a single division if they weren’t already promoting the same division within their own portfolio. 

4. Make Chael Sonnen the PFL’s version of Dana White

PFL needs a salesman. Badly. And anyone who listened closely to the company line coming out of PFL’s October PPV, when both Davis and Murray acted as if PFL had become the first fight promotion to walk on the moon, would agree. Sonnen is an interesting idea considering his charm, political pedigree and salesmanship. He also may be too close to both UFC and White for this to be a reality as Sonnen is still employed by ESPN, which is also home to PFL, as an MMA analyst on UFC-branded shows. But regardless of the specific choice, having a definitive voice to play a similar role as White would help on a week-to-week basis in everything from public relations to fight promotion. White is known for his combative style and maverick ways. Someone like former Strikeforce and Bellator boss Scott Coker, who has been the only promoter since Pride and Nobuyuki Sakakibara to actually compete with UFC, preferred to operate in a more relaxed style. Both were effective, however, because the MMA media respected them based upon the success each had in developing their names within this sport. PFL could use that kind of credibility.  

5. Empower more MMA people to make MMA decisions

Davis seems like a good man. And his decorated history of business success outside of MMA makes him a fresh voice for new ideas within the sport. But he did nothing short of shoot himself in the foot verbally when he admitted to MMAFighting’s Mike Heck during a “Town Hall Q&A” in October that he doesn’t watch MMA during his non-working hours, doesn’t have a favorite fight and doesn’t seem to watch his competitors, at all. Even if the public perceived the comments as more harsh than they actually were, Davis gets branded as someone making key MMA decisions for a major promotion who also isn’t really a fan. And that’s a major perception problem because it might help explain why PFL is in the exact predicament it is after announcing to the world it was ready to take aim at the king. You can’t miss. And it feels like PFL continues to do just that with each small decision. The promotion, for example, is finally legalizing elbows for Friday’s card and has presented the change as PFL brass having listened to the criticism of fans. That’s, frankly, a great development. But it also came after the lifting of the 12-to-6 elbow ban across mainstream MMA and was insanely long overdue to begin with. PFL has a strong television deal with ESPN, a ton of celebrity investment and some smart and successful people running the show. But it’s clear how many of their MMA decisions are being made by a lot of those same people despite the promotion having access to some real legendary minds all around it, including executive Ray Sefo and broadcaster Randy Couture, just to name a couple. 

PFL needs to think like an MMA fan and bring consistently interesting fights to fans who already care about the UFC. And you have to win over those first on a consistent basis before you’ll ever hope of using crossover promotional weapons like Paul and Ngannou to attract the eyes of even more. If PFL commits to building that, sustained success can come. And so will new fans along with it. But PFL must decide who it is first and pool its resources more strategically if it has any hope of keeping a spark in flame.