Why Francis Ngannou’s return to MMA feels like a make-or-break moment in PFL’s future

For the first time in 33 months, former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou will return to an MMA cage on Saturday, this time in his debut appearance under the PFL banner. 

Ngannou (17-3), who made massive news by signing a lucrative, free-agent deal with PFL in March 2023, immediately used the leverage within his new contract to enter the professional boxing space, where he lost a pair of memorable bouts to former heavyweight champions Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua.

Now, at age 38, and just seven months removed from an absolutely brutal knockout loss to Joshua in Saudi Arabia, Ngannou returns to Riyadh with the entire PFL promotion seemingly supported on his broad shoulders. The native of Cameroon also will look to put a recent family tragedy — the death of his 15-month son, Kobe, in April — behind him in his first MMA bout since outpointing Cyril Gane at UFC 270 in January 2022 to unify the promotion’s heavyweight title in the final bout of his UFC contract. 

But for all of the questions surrounding exactly how good Ngannou will still look given his age and inactivity when he faces 6-foot-8 Brazilian striker and 2023 PFL heavyweight tournament champion Renan Ferreira in the main event of a pay-per-view card titled “PFL Super Fights: Battle of the Giants,” the bigger questions surround what this fight might mean to the promotion at large. 

Let’s remember, 2024 was expected to be a make-or-break calendar year for PFL, especially after co-founder Donn Davis began going public with the rhetoric that his promotion, which remains a distant second to UFC as far as U.S. MMA companies are concerned, wasn’t actually playing for second place at all. According to Davis, his promotion, which launched in 2018 after acquiring World Series of Fighting, was prepared to compete for the top global spot in the industry. 

If we head into the time machine and go back 10 months, the reasons for optimism were definitely present. 

PFL’s signing of Ngannou had been the biggest free-agent pickup of any MMA organization in years. The promotion also re-upped its broadcasting deal with ESPN, which doubles as the exclusive American home for UFC. PFL could also boast the signing of influencer-turned-boxer Jake Paul, who was expected to make his MMA debut in 2024, along with the signing of premium women’s boxing stars like Amanda Serrano and Savannah Marshall, to join crossover star boxer Claressa Shields on the roster. 

Add to that the fact that PFL had also purchased Bellator MMA from Paramount and was promoting a “PFL vs. Bellator” PPV card in February as an unofficial kickoff to this new era of promotional competition, it became clear just how ambitious PFL’s designs were at coming for the top spot. 

The biggest problem, of course, is that just about everything that has happened to the promotion after the minor success of the “PFL vs. Bellator” event, which saw Ferreira knock out Bellator heavyweight champion Ryan Bader just 21 seconds into the main event before being announced as Ngannou’s next opponent, has been a public relations disaster. 

It all started, in fact, back on that February night in Riyadh when PFL had Ngannou in attendance but couldn’t actually coordinate a face off between he and Ferreira after the main event concluded. Two weeks later, Ngannou was absolutely decimated by Joshua in a boxing ring in such violent and dramatic ways that it put Ngannou’s near-upset of Fury just five months earlier firmly in the rearview mirror. 

From there, PFL’s head-scratching decision not to merge its existing roster with all of the big names it acquired from Bellator only combined with the promotion’s ho-hum regular season format and lack of crossover names within its playoff tournament format to further water down any form of actual impact the promotion could have had in 2024. 

Up to now, neither Paul or Ngannou have actually competed inside the curiously titled SmartCage, while big-name Bellator fighters largely remain out of sight/out of mind while toiling in pointless rematches on international cards throughout the globe. There’s also PFL’s ambitious attempt at launching regional sub promotions in everywhere from Europe and Africa to the Middle East, that have done little to create any actual buzz stateside. 

Oh, and then there’s Kayla Harrison, arguably the face of PFL altogether as a two-time champion, who was allowed to exit her deal one fight early only to jump to rival UFC and instantly launch into women’s bantamweight title contention. All Davis has done since then is disparage her like a jealous ex-boyfriend at every turn (including comparing her PFL exit to that of Kevin Durant joining the Golden State Warriors to chase his first NBA ring).

Meanwhile, many of the biggest assets acquired by PFL in the Bellator deal also never competed at all. 

Bellator women’s featherweight champion and living legend, Cris Cyborg, who fights in Saturday’s co-main event against PFL champion (and Harrison conqueror) Larissa Pacheco, spent most of 2024 campaigning publicly to the media about Davis’ resistance in offering her a fight. In May, former two-time Bellator middleweight champion Gegard Mousasi was released from PFL after complaining about lack of fights offered and failure to pay guaranteed money, which escalated this week when Mousasi sued the promotion for over $15 million in damages. 

To be fair, it wasn’t the fans or media who declared that PFL would compete head-on with UFC in 2024, it was the promotion’s brass, Davis and CEO Peter Murray, themselves. And 2024 has seen the PFL brand take such an aggressive backseat in terms of relevance and the ability to create consistently positive headlines that it might appear now would be a great time to slow down the kind of rhetoric that PFL opened the year attempting to weaponize, right? 

If this week’s PFL media tour from Davis and Murray is any indication, that answer would a hard no. 

For as good as Saturday’s card is on paper with not just Ngannou-Ferreira and Cyborg-Pacheco above the marquee, but a can’t miss crossroads fight between former Bellator featherweight champion AJ McKee and Irish lightweight prospect Paul Hughes, the claims being made by Murray that this event is MMA’s best of 2024 — even above UFC 300 or the recent UFC (and Saudi Arabia financed) show at Las Vegas’ The Sphere in September — is wildly ambitious, at best.

Davis, meanwhile, bragged in recent weeks that PFL will spend more on Saturday’s card than the $20-plus million that UFC did at The Sphere. And he couldn’t seem to back down from additional claims that PFL already is the MMA co-leader with UFC and that White is “scared” to match his five best fighters against that of PFL. 

While Davis’ utopian plan of a UFC-PFL super card is refreshing for any MMA fan to ponder, the reality is that beyond a Jon Jones-Ngannou dream fight that UFC was unable to consummate while Jones sat out three full years (and only returned upon Ngannou’s UFC exit), there really isn’t much demand at all for fans to see any other kind of collaborations. And a lot of that has to do with how much PFL has buried so much of its top talent this year — including critically acclaimed fighters like McKee, Usman Nurmagomedov, Patchy Mix and Johnny Eblen — by promoting them on Bellator international cards with little-to-no fanfare behind them at all (or any tangible stakes for each fight). 

Until PFL makes the inevitable decision to combine its rosters and forego the regular season/playoff format — which isn’t nearly as revolutionary as Davis and Murray claim it to be — in favor of a proper PPV schedule, any nostalgic hope for PFL to play the “rising second fiddle” role once occupied by Strikeforce (until UFC bought out its chief competition in 2011) is nothing short of laughable. 

There’s no doubt about it, elite MMA needs competition among major promoters. And some of the decisions that were made by PFL over the past year have put the promotion in an interesting place to make some noise as the shadow of UFC continues to loom large over the global landscape. 

Finally getting Ngannou into the SmartCage is a big part of that, as is promoting such a can’t-miss (and potential passing-of-the-torch) fight like Cyborg-Pacheco. Getting Paul to make his MMA debut sooner than later as the kind of gimmick crossover combat sports fans simply can’t avoid missing would also be huge despite how unlikely it seems given his November boxing match with 58-year-old Mike Tyson. 

But considering how bad this year has been for PFL from the standpoint of living up to all of the wild boasts it has attempted to make, there really isn’t a potential outcome in Ngannou-Ferreira that could really do much to improve the promotion’s immediate outlook. 

Rather than telling the MMA world how great they are, PFL needs to do a better job showing. Maybe that begins with this Saturday in what can only be called the most important event in company history. 

And maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t.