Netflix and Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions had every reason to expect their first major MMA swing to land with a splash. Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano returning after years away from the cage already gave the card a heavy dose of nostalgia, and with names like Nate Diaz, Francis Ngannou, and Mike Perry stacked underneath, it looked built for easy attention. But with the May 16 event closing in, the buzz around the card has taken a different turn, as Ticketmaster’s seating map still appears to show large sections of the Intuit Dome unsold, giving fans an easy opening to question whether the hype has actually translated into demand.
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Ticketmaster currently shows large sections of the Intuit Dome still unsold, with more than half of the arena still available ahead of the May 16 event. Though it doesn’t necessarily mean that Jake Paul’s MVP card is doomed—combat sports ticket sales typically peak late in fight week—but it does present an odd image for what is being advertised as Netflix’s first MMA event, especially when the card itself does not lack recognizable names.
Along with Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano, the card includes Nate Diaz vs. Mike Perry, Ngannou vs. Philipe Lins, and UFC veteran Junior dos Santos‘ return to action. On name value alone, MVP has enough to make casual fans stop and look. The harder sell, though, is convincing hardcore MMA fans that the card carries the same competitive weight as a regular UFC night.
On the same night, the UFC is quietly hosting UFC Vegas 117 at the Apex in Las Vegas, headlined by Arnold Allen and Melquizael Costa. t is not the kind of event that competes with Netflix on scale or spectacle, but it does sit inside the UFC’s active divisional structure, with Allen still relevant at featherweight and Costa entering as one of the division’s hotter names. That difference matters. MVP has recognizable names from different eras of combat sports; UFC has fighters still moving through the current MMA ladder.
While Jake Paul’s Netflix event clearly leans toward spectacle and nostalgia in the hopes of capturing fan attention, UFC continues to control the MMA audience’s weekly viewing habits. This puts MVP in an awkward position: trying to usher in a new era of MMA streaming while fighting against the same machine that already owns the sport’s attention span. Netflix can give MVP reach, but it cannot instantly give the promotion the kind of MMA trust the UFC has built through years of rankings, title pictures, and weekly fight-night routines.
MVP Netflix MMA card still has many seats available 🤔
And as is evident, sometimes, even nostalgia can fail you, especially when you have someone like Arnold Allen fighting one of the hottest fighters in his division. At the same time, most of the MVP’s card features fighters like Nate Diaz, Ronda Rousey, Gina Carano, and Francis Ngannou, who are well past their UFC peaks despite their popularity.
That does not make the names meaningless. Rousey and Carano still carry real historical weight in women’s MMA, while Diaz and Ngannou remain major attractions in their own ways. But for a section of the fanbase, the issue is not whether they are famous. It is whether the fights feel connected to the present tense of the sport. As a result, when images of large swathes of Intuit Dome appearing unsold made their way onto social media, fans couldn’t help but give Jake Paul and his promotion a blunt reality check.
Fight fans call out Jake Paul’s MVP MMA for ‘washed’ fight card
Social media fans criticized Jake Paul’s MVP for focusing too much on aging stars and nostalgia rather than building real excitement around active contenders. For many, the explanation was simple: the card just didn’t look like a real MMA fight card.
“Because Jake Paul got us a bunch of old people fighting,” one fan remarked. Another added, “No surprise. It’s full of has-beens and never was.” Others mocked the lineup more brutally, with comments such as “Full of old washed fighters lmaoooo” and “Who wants to watch old chickens fighting on this s— card?”
Much of the criticism centered around Ronda Rousey herself after she hyped the event by taking constant digs at the UFC.
“This is not just the biggest women’s fight of all time,” Rousey told the press last month. “This is something that’s going to happen once in a lifetime in MMA; it is the beginning of something huge.”
Rousey has also leaned into the fighter-pay argument while promoting the card, saying MVP was trying to “raise the ceiling” and “raise the floor” for athletes. She pointed to the card’s $40,000 minimum purse and took aim at the UFC by arguing that fighters should at least be able to make a living wage. That gave MVP another selling point beyond nostalgia, but it also made the backlash sharper once fans began questioning whether the event itself had enough demand behind it.
Now this very line is coming back to haunt her as fans immediately pushed back on that claim online. One fan wrote, “‘Biggest fight in MMA BAR NONE’—Delusional a– c— @rondarousey.” More chimed in with comments such as, “But Rhonda said it’s the biggest MMA fight of all time,” and “They might do better by hyping their own fighters rather than trashing other promotions.”
At the same time, plenty of hardcore MMA fans admitted they simply plan to watch the UFC instead. “We will be watching Allen vs Costa in the Apex instead of this,” one user stated, while another bluntly wrote, “Because mighty Arnold Allen at same time.”
That probably explains the split better than the seating map alone. MVP may have built a card that can pull in casual curiosity, especially with Rousey, Carano, Diaz, Perry, and Ngannou attached to it. But hardcore MMA fans often follow momentum, rankings, form, and divisional stakes more than name value alone. So even if the Netflix event still finds an audience on streaming, the empty-seat screenshots have already given fans a simple visual argument against the idea that MVP has arrived as a serious UFC alternative.
