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Twenty-nine pieces

The complete roster, by section. Every figure on the site comes from a filing, a company report, a federation document or a commission’s published purse sheet.

Fighter Pay

Fighter Pay	The Number Everyone in the Business Already Knew The Le v. Zuffa antitrust settlement confirmed in dollars what fighters had argued for years. The UFC's response was to go public, merge with WWE, and keep the contract structure intact.
Fighter Pay	Settled in the Morning, Sold Again in the Afternoon The UFC resolved a decade of antitrust litigation and then commanded a record rights fee inside the same corporate transformation — the timing tells you everything about which number the business cared about.
Fighter Pay	What a Revenue Share Looks Like When a Union Negotiates It A direct comparison of athlete revenue share in the UFC against the NBA and NFL's collective-bargaining figures, using each league's publicly reported or filed numbers with attribution and year. An explainer of why the gap exists structurally, not as polemic.
Fighter Pay	How a Commission Purse Sheet Actually Reads Using published athletic commission purse disclosures — Nevada, California, New York — as primary documents, this piece explains what the numbers show and what they omit: disclosed purses versus total compensation, and why the sheet is incomplete by design.
Fighter Pay	The Discretionary Bonus Is Not a Benefit Post-fight bonuses look like generosity. The math says otherwise.

Who Owns What

Who Owns What	One Company Now Holds the UFC and WWE, and It Is Not in the Fight Business TKO Group Holdings is a publicly traded content and live-events company. The fighting happens to be the content.
Who Owns What	The PFL Bought Bellator and Pays for a Table Finish Two promotion brands, one owner, a playoff bracket, and a $1 million prize that functions as the entire compensation structure's headline number.
Who Owns What	ONE Championship Runs Its Own Numbers The Singapore-based promotion has a distinct financial structure, a proprietary weight system, and broadcast commitments that set it apart from the North American market — but its valuation has moved in both directions.
Who Owns What	When One Buyer Can Outbid Every Promoter at Once Saudi money has not disrupted boxing's promoter map — it has made the map temporarily irrelevant.
Who Owns What	Why Boxing Has Four Champions Per Division The WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO — how four separate sanctioning bodies came to coexist, what each charges in sanctioning fees, and why no single body has consolidated the others despite decades of pressure. An explainer drawing on each body's own published history.
Who Owns What	The Promoter Map Before Riyadh Arrived Three broadcasters, three rosters, three geographic footprints — and then the Saudi money showed up.

The Rules

The Rules	The Sport Is Regulated by Whoever Happens to Run the State You Fight In The Unified Rules of MMA were adopted in 2000, then amended in 2017 — and neither version is actually binding on anyone.
The Rules	The ABC Does Not Run Anyone's Commission A voluntary standards body writes the model rules. Every state then does what it wants.
The Rules	Same-Day Weigh-Ins as a Regulatory Response The athletic commissions moved first; the science followed later
The Rules	ONE's Hydration Rule Is a Different Weight System, Not a Test ONE Championship's pre-fight hydration protocol does not simply ban weight-cutting — it relocates athletes to a different competitive tier entirely.
The Rules	The UFC Changed Its Testing Partner in 2023, and the Arguments Have Not Stopped The UFC's move from USADA to Drug Free Sport International — what each organisation's testing protocols say on paper, what the critics of the switch have argued in documented public statements, and what the commission oversight layer does and does not add.
The Rules	Open Scoring Has Been Tried, and the Results Are Inconclusive Every few years a high-profile robbery decision brings open scoring back onto the regulatory agenda. The evidence from actual pilots is murkier than its advocates admit.

Grappling

Grappling	ADCC Now Pays, and the Qualifying Circuit Is Why It Matters Prize money alone did not make the ADCC Submission Wrestling World Championship the benchmark event in competitive grappling — but the qualifying circuit it built around that money is what made the prize defensible.
Grappling	The IBJJF World Championship Can Cost Its Winners More Than It Pays Them The International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation's prize structure against the fees athletes pay to compete — the specific figures, the public dispute they generated, and the federation's response, as a story about how a belt-granting body monetises its own ranking system.
Grappling	Submission-Only Versus Points: Two Rulebooks Producing Two Different Sports The IBJJF and ADCC both call their athletes grapplers. The rulebooks they compete under reward almost opposite skills.
Grappling	No-Gi Outgrew the Gi Without Anyone Deciding It Should The shift from a kimono to board shorts reshaped the economics of submission grappling — not by policy, but by market pressure on three fronts at once.
Grappling	The Belt System Is a Commercial Franchise, Not a Standard Belt promotion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu is not governed by any external body — it is a revenue mechanism operated by whoever runs the gym network.

The Federations

The Federations	Boxing Lost Its Federation and Nearly Its Place The IOC stripped the IBA of its recognition in June 2023. What follows is the governance trail that made it inevitable, and the new body trying to buy boxing back into Los Angeles.
The Federations	Karate Was in at Tokyo and Gone for Paris, and the Reason Is Structural One Olympic cycle, then out: the World Karate Federation's brief inclusion tells you more about how the IOC allocates slots than about the sport itself.
The Federations	World Taekwondo's Electronic Scoring Vest Changed What the Sport Rewards The sensor changed the sport before the rulebook caught up.
The Federations	The IJF Has Rewritten Its Own Rulebook Four Times Since 2010 Four rounds of amendments in fifteen years have quietly remade the sport's competitive vocabulary.
The Federations	United World Wrestling's Doping Cases as a Document Trail UWW's published anti-doping decisions — the volume, the nationalities, and the sanctions applied — read as a record of how a federation enforces its own rules, using UWW's own decision database with case dates and outcomes attributed.

Where It Came From

Where It Came From	Six Dates That Explain Why the Business Looks the Way It Does Six moments — a Kodokan, a Tokyo dojo, a political compromise, a Brazilian beach town, a Hong Kong rooftop, and a Denver arena — that set the commercial architecture of every combat sport operating today.
Where It Came From	Mitsuyo Maeda Landed in Brazil and the Affiliation Model Followed How Maeda's teaching of Carlos Gracie from 1917 produced not only Brazilian jiu-jitsu but the specific gym-affiliation and lineage-fee structure that still organises the sport commercially — connecting the historical moment to the present business model.