Ronda Rousey said that her upcoming fight with Gina Carano had originally been planned under the UFC banner before agreeing to headline MVP’s first MMA event in May.
Rousey and Carano are both due to return to the sport they retired from, the former after her last fight in 2016 and the latter in 2009. But Rousey said during the press conference for the upcoming fight that they had originally intended to see it happen in UFC. Though ultimately that turned out not to be the case.
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“It’s become about changing the entire landscape of the sport and challenging the monolith that the UFC has become,” Rousey said. “I’m so grateful that Gina trusted me when it wasn’t going to work out with the UFC. I told her, I was like, ‘We can do this on our own. We don’t need them. We don’t need anyone.’ And she said, ‘I’m going to follow your lead. I’m going to trust you.’ And that’s what led us to MVP, and to Netflix, and to us sitting here to put on the most viewed MMA fight of all time.”
Carano said that she was first approached with the idea while Rousey was three months pregnant in December 2024, and Rousey added that while she knew they could promote the fight by themselves she approached Dana White with it first out of love and respect.
“Originally we were going to do New Year’s, and it was going to be the last fight under the pay-per-view model, and he offered me the best pay-per-view structure ever and I was so grateful. But then Gina said she needed more time to get into the best shape possible and that she wanted me to fight the best version of herself. I think that was fate. It was meant to be,” she said.
Rousey continued to say that, once the UFC had moved from pay-per-view to streaming through Paramount+, White had a fiduciary duty not to stage the best fights but to maximize shareholder value. And thus it just made sense for them to stage the match for themselves with the help of MVP.
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Read the original article on Wrestling Inc.
