Quite why Ukraine’s heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk is fighting a Dutch kickboxer at the Pyramids of Giza nobody seems to know.
Then there’s the rematch between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, Mayweather’s rumoured exhibition with Mike Tyson in DR Congo, Pacquiao versus Ruslan Provodnikov and Ronda Rousey’s MMA clash with Gina Carano. All of that surfaced in the last month alone. Must have missed the clamour for those.
We’ve already seen a 58-year-old Tyson totter about the ring with social media star Jake Paul, and then watched with grim inevitability as Anthony Joshua shattered Paul’s jaw.
What next? Chuck Liddell vs Naseem Hamed? Brock Lesnar vs Deontay Wilder? In this era of increasingly curious combat spectacles, anything, it seems, is possible.
Gimmick fights are nothing new. Muhammad Ali tangled with the Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki, and also faced the bear-wrestling journeyman Chuck Wepner in a bout that inspired the Rocky movies.
But this is something altogether different – never before have they occurred with such frequency, or benefitted from the promotional heft they now receive.
Usyk’s unnecessary mismatch against Rico Verhoeven will be broadcast by Dazn and is being bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's GEA chairman Turki Alalshikh.
According to Verhoeven, it was first suggested to Alalshikh by the actor Jason Statham, just to add another layer to the farce.
Mayweather-Pacquiao 2, meanwhile, is set to be a Netflix mega event at The Sphere in Las Vegas this September.
In more sensible times, such matchups were confined to bar-room chit-chat. In 2026, they are created, financed and platformed by the most powerful, wealthy, and influential people in sports and entertainment.
What was once a sideshow has become the main event.
A bubble or the future of combat sports?
That in turn poses several questions: Is this just a fad or the future of mainstream combat sports? Where does this trend leave traditional boxing, and are such events sustainable given they so often disappoint in the ring?
“It's not the first carnival fight on Netflix,” the British boxing writer Steve Bunce told the BBC when reacting to the announcement of Mayweather-Pacquiao 2. “We've had Mike Tyson against Jake Paul. We've had Jake Paul against Anthony Joshua. We're so far down the freak fight road that this one doesn't actually raise any alarm bells.
“It'll just be two men, way past their best, in a legitimate fight that is nothing more than an ego-driven sparring session. This circus just gets deeper and deeper and deeper.”
Bunce’s dismay at the prevalence of “freak fights”, as he calls them, is commonplace in a boxing industry currently in a state of flux.
Alalshikh – via a proxy in Dana White’s Zuffa Boxing – is attempting, in his words, to “crush” the sport's existing promoters, many of whom were previously his partners. The initial momentum that Saudi Arabia brought to boxing has been lost to this power struggle, with lawsuits active and the 2026 calendar looking thin.
So far, the Zuffa project has been underwhelming, with uninspiring fights and a mediocre but growing roster headlined by the signing of the controversial but limited Conor Benn, whose notoriety stems from his famous father and two failed drug tests rather than any in-ring glory.
All of that acrimony, plus an ageing pool of star names, has stymied the flow of big fights. Terence Crawford, ‘Canelo’ Alvarez, Tyson Fury, Joshua and Usyk have all either retired or are very close to doing so.
Usyk should be facing the No 1 ranked contender Agit Kabayel, who said of his upcoming bout: “Great fight between two legends, but Rico's last boxing fight was in 2014. In my opinion, fights like this shouldn't be for the world title belt. Otherwise, sooner or later, boxing will lose the trust of the fans.”
Alalshikh's support of gimmick fights is telling. However, it is the entry of Netflix into this space that offers the clearest indication they are here to stay.
The streaming giant has around 325 million subscribers worldwide and a bottomless pit of money to throw at their new sports venture, which already includes the WWE and NFL games.
And while they have platformed elite boxing, such as Crawford's 2025 victory over Canelo, and Fury’s imminent comeback against Arslanbek Makhmudov, the gimmicks have been among their headline productions.
A casual and diverse global audience with a reported median age range of 35-44 might have something to do with that.
A numbers game for Netflix
The American actor and boxing fan Mario Lopez told a story on his podcast The Three Knockdown Rule about a chance encounter with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos.
Sarandos was said to be giddy with excitement as he told Lopez about an upcoming combat sports event he’d just signed off on.
As it transpired, that event was Joshua’s brutal and frankly dangerous knockout of Paul last December in perhaps the most depressing example of this trend.
When approached to discuss their move into prizefighting, a Netflix spokesperson told The National: “We are not pursuing interviews focused on our sports strategy.”
That strategy is to embrace “icon-driven competition”, according to Netflix’s Gabe Spitzer in a press release to announce Rousey vs Carano – an MMA bout between a 39-year-old Rousey who last competed a decade ago, and the 43-year-old Carano, a veteran of just eight pro MMA bouts, the last of which was in 2009, and subsequently pursued an acting career.
The bottom line for Netflix will always be subscriptions, and robust viewing figures have underlined the appetite for gimmicks.
The 'Mike Tyson effect' helped his bout with Paul reach more than 60 million households and a global audience of 108m, according to Netflix. The viewership of Joshua-Paul was estimated at 33m.
But how many times can you hype an event only for the product in the ring to prove shambolic? How many times can you lean into nostalgia before the sales pitch wears thin?
The problem with older fighters is that they are old. Although the most lucrative fight in history, Mayweather-Pacquiao was a dud in 2015, so with both men now nearly 50 and fighting only to stave off financial ruin, nostalgia is about all they can offer.
Netflix is more commonly associated with movies and shows, such as the AMC classic Mad Men, where chief protagonist Don Draper often weaponised sentimentality to sell advertising.
“Nostalgia is delicate, but it’s potent,” he said while pitching the executives from Kodak.
“It’s like the pain from an old wound,” he continued, which, taken literally, describes how most feel about Mayweather-Pacquiao 1.
Despite the renewal of their famous rivalry undoubtedly tapping into the rich potency of nostalgia – like any number of old sequels available on Netflix, it’s unlikely to have aged well.
