Dana White recently joked that lots of people watch Jake Paul fight, but no one is willing to pay for the privilege. It’s been a serious problem for “The Problem Child” considering how widely available illegal streams are — a problem Paul and his team may have solved for his next fight against Mike Tyson.
The Paul vs. Tyson boxing match is set to go down on July 20th from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Those who can’t attend in person can watch the fight for free so long as they have a Netflix account, giving it a potential audience of over 260 million subscribers.
“The fact that it’s on Netflix, I think that’s gonna really revolutionize the game in boxing,” Paul said on his YouTube channel. “I think streaming could potentially be a very bright future for the sport … No more PPV? I’ll probably still do pay-per-view. I don’t know, we’ll see. Maybe this is what the the fans are gonna show out for.”
Nakisa Bidarian, who was previously the UFC’s Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Financial Officer.
“We’ve been meeting with [Netflix] for probably over a year now, seeding this idea to them that we should do a fight together,” Paul said. “And they instantly were like, ‘Yeah, let’s make it happen!’ And so Most Valuable Promotions in me and Nakisa had just been trying to find the right fight, the right time frame, the right event. We knew we wanted a target this summer, so we just started making calls.”
“We called Tommy Fury, he was one of the names, and he said no. He wanted more money … So we started going around to different people, and then [we] had the Mike conversation. I was like, ‘Yo, we should just go for Mike.’ This was probably like four or five months ago.”
signed a $5 billion deal to air WWE events in 2025 but Tyson vs. Paul will be the first major live sporting event to air on the platform. Paul expects there to be more big fights like this popping up on major streaming networks.
“I think it’s gonna set a precedent,” he said. “The fight just has to make sense. There has to be a high allure for it to make sense financially for the streaming platforms because they have to quantify how many new subscribers, what’s this doing for the monthly and daily active users. But, yeah, it’s pretty crazy. I think the craziest thing is that we curated it, did it, brought it all to life as well. That’s probably what I’m actually most proud of is being on the promotional side and growing MVP as well.”
“I think it’s gonna be a massive, massive, massive success. Everyone’s going to want to fight each other, and they’re going to be running to Netflix or Amazon Prime. All these [streamers], Peacock, everyone’s probably gonna try to get in on this in some form or fashion.”
