Ronda Rousey Rips UFC ahead of Gina Carano fight: ‘They want the brand to be the star. The UFC has lost sight.’
Ronda Rousey is days away from her long-awaited fight with Gina Carano, but in her view the real battle is over who controls the future of mixed martial arts. In a new interview with Complex, the former UFC champion painted a picture of a promotion that no longer wants stars, only a logo.
Ronda Rousey blasts UFC before Gina Carano showdown
“I think they don’t want that star power anymore. They want the brand to be the star. That’s why they stopped naming the fight cards and started giving them numbers. That’s why they started putting everybody in a uniform and trying to stamp out their individuality.”
Rousey linked the UFC’s shift to the introduction of numbered cards, standardized Venom-era outfits and a corporate focus on the letters “UFC” over individual fighters. She argued that the promotion’s handling of names like Nate Diaz and Francis Ngannou shows how the balance of power has moved.
“They want people to show up to watch the brand. And that’s why when you have big stars like Nate Diaz and Francis Ngannou, who know their worth and demand more, they’re telling them to go kick rocks instead of paying them what they’re worth. They think they’re too big to fail and that there’s nowhere else for these fighters to go.”
Her counterexample is the streaming spectacle that changed the combat sports business overnight: Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul. That event, promoted by MVP and carried globally by Netflix, drew 108 million live views according to Rousey, and became a proof-of-concept for character-driven matchups on a tech platform rather than a traditional pay-per-view outlet.
“People don’t tune in to watch a belt. They don’t tune in to watch a brand. They tune in to watch two fighters. That’s what I think the Tyson versus Paul fight proved. This was the most-viewed combat sports event of all time, 108 million live views. It’s not for a belt. It’s not for two people at the very top of the sport. It’s for two characters that resonate with people.”
Rousey’s return is part of MVP’s deeper move into MMA in partnership with Netflix. The company, co-founded by Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian, built its name in boxing, then expanded into women’s boxing with the MVPW platform and a multi-year broadcast deal stacking Netflix, DAZN, Sky Sports and ESPN across different event tiers. Now it is staging its first MMA show at Intuit Dome in Inglewood on May 16, with Rousey vs. Carano at the top of the card and Netflix streaming live to its subscriber base.
Rousey says this opportunity only existed because UFC passed. Sports Business Journal has reported that MVP’s MMA debut “fell into its lap” after the promotion declined to put the Rousey–Carano fight together, at a time when MVP had already become a key broker between combat sports and Netflix through events like Tyson–Paul.
Inside the UFC, Rousey describes a culture shift around the time the company moved from traditional pay-per-view to a streaming-led model and UFC executive Hunter Campbell gained more influence. She claims the promotion initially offered her “a great deal” for a final pay-per-view, framed as a last featherweight title fight, but says Campbell worked against the Carano matchup.
“He actively tried to sabotage this fight. He tried to misrepresent Gina, saying that she wasn’t serious, that she wouldn’t make weight. He was trying to get me to fight other people. He was basically just trashing us and the marketability of our fight.”
What seems to cut deepest for Rousey is the way she says UFC leadership talks about women’s divisions and even slap fighting. She recalls Campbell speaking with open contempt about the 145-pound division and, through a story relayed by her mother, long involved with athletic commissions, joking that slap-fighting athletes would otherwise be “doing meth in a trailer park.”
“This is the new leadership in the company. This is the company that I helped build, the sport that I helped build for women, and I did not have much confidence in its future in his hands. After getting that kind of rude awakening to the new state of the company, I realized that I had to take this into my own hands and go another route. Luckily, MVP and Netflix were willing to take a bet on us.”
All of this sets up this weekend’s Rousey–Carano fight as more than a legacy bout. It is a live test of Rousey’s thesis that in 2026, personality-driven events on streaming platforms can challenge the UFC’s control of big-fight storytelling.
