GFL Wants You To Get Excited About This?

MMA’s newest promotion isn’t doing a great job at promoting themselves.

The Global Fight League (GFL), an upstart league that hopes to rival the PFL and even the UFC, started to announce fights for its inaugural season this week. Pulling from the rosters that six different teams drafted last month, they released four fights.

Out of the four bouts, the average age was 42. Two of the fighters are 47. At least three of the fighters had previously announced retirement from MMA. None of them are particularly on a roll right now.

That’s unflattering. But worse, a certain matchup in particular was outright concerning. One of the fighters booked to compete, Fabricio Werdum, said just months ago in a court filing that he believes he is suffering symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

“I fear that during my career I have suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI) and am noticing symptoms common with TBI and CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) including irritability, anger, anxiety, insomnia and memory loss,” Werdum said as part of a filing for Cung Le et al. v. Zuffa last year, commonly known as the UFC antitrust lawsuit. “I have many lesions and scarring in my brain, and I have a cyst that is located centrally within my brain making surgery thus far impossible. I monitor this cyst with biannual exams to determine if it is growing.”

The few fights that GFL has announced are supposed to draw excitement and interest. But personally, all I can think about is how a lineup featuring old timers is showing up to take unnecessary damage for one last paycheck. And in the case of Werdum, I can’t stop thinking about what he said about his own physical state just months back. I’m not excited. I’m not even interested. If I had it my way, none of these fights would happen.

If there’s one positive to the situation, it’s this: Maybe the fights won’t actually happen! While matchups were “confirmed” this week, neither a date nor location was attached to any of the meetings. Usually, a fight is announced with a time and date, you know, so people know how to watch it. It felt a little peculiar to see such details not included.

GFL is the new kid on the block. This is to say, they haven’t even proven that they can put on an event (You normally prove this by, well, putting on an event). So, I don’t think it’s over the top to show some skepticism when their first show—which they say will be in April, putting it as soon as one-and-a-half months from now—has no details revealed about it yet. We have seen proof that they can sign fighters to a brand. Proof regarding everything else? Not so much.

The recent fight announcements were just the latest concerning developments from the GFL.

Last month, I expressed hope that GFL could be something fresh and new in MMA. The top level of the sport—leagues where fighters can make a full-time living of some sort—is just the UFC and PFL nowadays. Having a third player in that tier would be great for not only the fans but the fighters as well.

I looked past the many old-timers in their draft pool, as there were also lots of young up-and-comers who could be placed on teams as well. Maybe the more promising names would outweigh the, well, washed-up names.

But, after watching their three-hour draft presentation a few weeks back, it was hard to keep the optimism I initially had. A ton of old fighters got picked for the roster, and no official dates for the first show were revealed.

Weeks later, the situation has only worsened. GFL wants you to get excited about matchups featuring the oldest fighters on their roster facing off against each other, and they want you to maintain that enthusiasm until they eventually announce where these fights will actually take place.

Overall, this situation kind of sucks. But, I’ll provide one piece of positivity here: It’s not too late for GFL to turn this thing around. They literally haven’t done any shows, so what’s stopping them from just completely changing everything?

I get it, it would be awkward to suddenly scrap the plans you revealed. But when you have tons of people saying what you’re doing is a bad idea, and you listen to those voices and you make changes, you might actually win some critics over.

If they can turn things around, maybe delay their launch a little, clean up the image that has already taken a beating in just a few months by revamping their roster, and re-launch later on, then GFL could still have potential.

Until then, I don’t have much optimism for a third big promotion emerging in MMA anytime soon.