Ben FowlkesUncrownedTue, November 25, 2025 at 8:13 PM UTC·6 min readAll the way back in 1993, which might as well be the stone age as far as mixed martial arts is concerned, some visionary knuckleheads brought a grand idea into the homes of North America. A single-night tournament with no weight classes and almost no rules, all to determine the world’s ultimate fighting champion.
You know how this story goes. It starts with an eight-man bracket inside the half-full McNichols Sports Arena in Denver and leads to a multi-billion-dollar sports behemoth we know as the UFC. It also leads, within a few years’ time, to the total abandonment of the tournament format that was at the heart of its original sales pitch.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementLook around at the MMA world of 2025. You’ll see that this is a familiar arc for fight promoters. It typically goes a little something like this:
— Announce a bold new MMA venture built around a tournament format of some kind.
— Enjoy some initial fan interest driven by general curiosity.
— Confront and attempt to work around the built-in challenges of this approach.
— Ditch the tournament format altogether and move to just putting on fights one at a time like everybody else.
It happened in the UFC. It happened in Bellator. Now it’s happened in PFL.
As PFL CEO John Martin recently told Uncrowned’s Ariel Helwani, the company eventually decided that tournament format was “overly complicated.” What had once served to set the PFL apart from the UFC and the alphabet soup of three-letter fight promotions had become a liability.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“The tournament structure was asking a lot of the fans,” Martin said on “The Ariel Helwani Show” earlier this month. “If you’re the challenger brand, if you’re not the UFC in this instance, there’s going to be a desire when people look at you to go, ‘Well, why do I have to pay any attention to you? What’s your hook? How are you different?’ The format is one easy way. You can say, ‘Well, they do it this way, we’re going to do it this way.’ I said, let’s just simplify it because the fighters are good enough.”
It’s a siren’s song, the tournament structure. Fight promoters like it for a couple reasons. For starters, it has a way of making us gradually come to care about people we otherwise had no particular feelings about.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThat first UFC was a great example of this. Most of those who tuned in on pay-per-view (and there were only about 86,000 of them) knew nothing at all about any of the tournament participants. They were introduced to them for the first time on the broadcast, right before finding out who would move on and who would go home minus a few teeth. Through the violent shaving down of the field, the competitors who remained took on a new aura. Fans got to know and care about these people all in one night. A neat little magic trick for promoters who started with really no known names to sell.
But there are so many ways for a single-night tournament to go wrong. All you need is for one or two winners to get injured in the process of punching their tickets to the next round and pretty soon you have alternates in the finals and the whole thing loses a lot of its appeal.
Even if you pull off something improbably perfect, there’s no guarantee it will carry over to anything resembling ongoing success. Who but the hardcores remember Drew Fickett winning the 2010 Shine Fights Grand Prix? And when Renato “Babalu” Sobral won a hilariously stacked single-night IFC tournament in 2003 (seriously, this thing had Forrest Griffin, Chael Sonnen, Jeremy Horn and Mauricio “Shogun” Rua), it went down in MMA history as “the greatest show never seen.”
Not that cramming everything into a single night is the only option, of course. Back in the glory days of PRIDE FC, its grand prix tournaments stretched out over many weeks, resulting in some of MMA's most memorable moments. Then there was the Strikforce Heavyweight Grand Prix, which helped introduce the sport to eventual UFC two-division champ Daniel Cormier.
What tournaments offer is a narrative. At the core, that's the appeal. Narratives are hard to come by and harder to sustain when you’re just scheduling one fight at a time, trying to build toward title bouts featuring champs and contenders we may or may not know. When you have that tournament bracket to point to, you don’t need to explain why Fighter A is taking on Fighter B. There’s an inherent logic to it. The stakes are baked in, especially if you add a big grand prize and maybe a giant novelty-sized check for the winner to pose with at the end.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut one by one we’ve watched MMA’s foremost tournament-based promotions jettison the idea. Even those who used it to set themselves apart from the UFC, promising a merit-based approach where company politics played no role in title shots, decided to go the more conventional route eventually.
UFC CEO Dana White famously hates tournaments. The one time he relented, back when the UFC set out to establish an inaugural men’s flyweight champion, the four-man field got messy right away after a scoring error in the semifinals threatened to immediately plunge the whole thing into chaos. The look on White’s face at the post-fight press conference could best be described as frustrated yet vindicated. Like, see why we don’t do this?
PFL’s decision to drop its convoluted regular season and playoff format makes a certain kind of sense. At some point you realize you’re spending so much time explaining how all this works while losing the already fragile attention of fans in the process.
But without the formatting to set it apart, PFL now looks more like just another MMA promotion, though with lesser-known fighters. It’s the UFC but with the wattage turned down. It risks blending into the background of the sport. Fight promotions have tried everything to avoid this. From team-based approaches (when I say International, you say Fight League! Fight League!) to strange fighting surfaces of all kinds (shouts to the YAMMA pit), the goal has been to find some way, any way, to stand out while standing apart.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementDitching that means moving toward something we can more easily recognize. It also means following a long-established trend that’s been passed down from one promoter to the next throughout the mayfly generations of this sport. If our history tells us anything, it’s that a promotion can be birthed by the tournament, but it cannot live on tournaments alone.
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