Jake Paul Now Owns a UBO. It’s Just Not Allowed in Boxing

By Larry Goldberg

Congress has spent a year and forty pages of statute defining a unified boxing organization: one company that signs the fighters, promotes the fights, runs the rankings, and crowns the champions. Everybody in the sport assumed the first UBO would be Zuffa Boxing. I said so myself; Dana White runs with the President of the United States. He cannot do business and interact with half of the “knuckleheads” in boxing, and building a bubble around his orbit makes sense.

Then Jake Paul merged MVP with the PFL. His company now runs a boxing roster under MVP and an MMA league in the PFL. And here is the joke nobody in Washington seems to be in on: the PFL is already everything the bill calls a UBO. Its own titles. Its own rankings. A league format. Fighters under exclusive contract to the organization that crowns them.

And those contracts are not a secret. A lawsuit put one into the public record, and Combat Sports Law broke down the terms. The deal starts at one season. The PFL can extend it. Then extend it again. If the fighter becomes champion, it extends again, automatically. The fighter cannot say no. That is the exact champion’s-clause setup the Ali Act banned in boxing 25 years ago. It is running today, in writing, at the company owned by the sport’s loudest fighter-pay advocate. All perfectly legal, because it is MMA. The UFC has run the same model for two decades. What is new is that a boxing promoter owns one now, and the boxing half of his own company is banned by federal law from the deal structure the MMA half runs on.

Hold those two facts next to each other, because nobody else has. The company’s public face is fighter pay: 50 percent of revenue, guaranteed minimums, the athletes as the product. The company’s contracts run on automatic extensions the fighter cannot refuse, the exact control the Ali Act was written to stop. Nothing stops MVP from putting the Ali Act’s protections into its MMA contracts voluntarily, today. It has not done it. The fighter-friendly revolution stops exactly where the leverage starts.

So why is the same structure illegal on the boxing side of his own company?

Because of John McCain. The Muhammad Ali Act of 2000, the law this bill rewrites, banned exactly this arrangement in boxing: the coercive contracts, the promoter owning the path to the title, all of it. McCain built that wall after two years of testimony about what promoters were doing to fighters. And here is one of history’s better ironies: McCain is also the man who nearly killed the UFC. He called it human cockfighting and wrote all fifty governors, which drove the cage toward the state commissions and the regulation that saved it. One senator, two sports. The reason they live under different rules today is mostly that boxing had its scandals first.

Which brings me to the question this whole debate keeps stepping around, and it is simpler than forty pages: why do we have different laws for people getting hit in the head?

A boxer and an MMA fighter can share a locker room in the same building on the same night. Same brains, same damage, same risks. One has a federal law standing behind his contract and his medicals. The other has whatever his contract says and whatever his state requires. The bill in front of the Senate does not close that gap; it locks it in. I have made the full case for one rulebook already, so here I will just say it plainly. Make it simple. Keep fighters safe. Every combat sport, one floor. There is no version of “his brain matters less because his gloves are smaller” that survives being said out loud.

New Jersey figured this out years ago. The statute I promote under is a combat sports law, not a boxing law. One commission, one set of medicals, one rulebook for everything where blows to the head are legal. The refs and officials there are tougher than anywhere, which is exactly how everyone should want it. I comply with all of it, gladly, because the alternative is guessing about the health of the men I put in a ring. If one state agency can write that sentence, Congress can copy it.

Now the part that makes the Jake Paul UBO genuinely interesting instead of just funny: the pay. His people are not shy about it. Nakisa Bidarian, the former UFC executive who runs MVP’s business, told Bloomberg the focus “has always been to at least provide 50% of revenue to athletes.” Their first MMA card guaranteed every fighter a $40,000 minimum. The UFC’s standard entry deal is $12,000 to show and $12,000 to win. The commonly cited figure for the UFC’s share of revenue going to fighters is 16 to 20 percent. And Bidarian went right at them: “I wish the UFC would show up tomorrow and say we’re increasing fighter pay to 50%. But guess what? They can’t do that. That will crush their margins, which will crush their enterprise value, which will crush their personal net worth.”

Sit with that, but read it carefully. A revenue split and a contract are two different promises. Fifty percent of the money inside a contract you cannot leave is not freedom. It is a better-paid version of the same locked door the Ali Act was built to open. The UFC keeps the fighters’ share in the teens. MVP says the share is the product. Neither one puts in writing the thing the Ali Act actually guaranteed: the fighter’s right to walk when the term ends. Higher pay does not cancel a coercive contract. It just makes the door more expensive.

And Dana White has answered the pay critics the same way for years: if you don’t like it, start your own organization, no barrier to entry, pay them whatever you want. He usually adds that everyone who tried it failed. Well. Somebody took the invitation. There is now a league promising at least 50 percent to the athletes, run by the loudest fighter-pay critic in combat sports, with a former UFC executive doing the math. So let’s figure it out. Run both models side by side, on the pay and on the paper, and let the fighters, the fans, and the market keep score. For once boxing does not have to guess what a league would mean. The experiment White dared people to run for a decade is finally running, in the building next door, on the opposite theory of the split.

That is the real story hiding inside this bill. The league model is not coming to boxing; Jake Paul’s company proves it is already here, one word of federal law away. The question is which version gets written into law, and whether the fighters’ deal gets better on the check and on the contract, or only on the check. My ledger of who won the rewrite says nobody in that room was carrying the fighters’ side. Here is a place to start. One rulebook for every fighter. A bill that makes the 50 percent model easier to run. And a simple test for the man selling the revolution while owning both rosters: put the Ali Act’s contract windows and exit rights into the PFL deals voluntarily, today, in writing. Until the paper matches the rhetoric, the paper is the promise.

Make it simple. Keep fighters safe. The rest is paperwork.