PFL CEO trashes ESPN for ‘not doing anything to promote’ the league

Credit: The Ariel Helwani Show

As the Worldwide Leader in Sports, ESPN has the power to supercharge any sports league it decides to put on its airwaves. Unfortunately for mixed martial arts promotion PFL (Professional Fighters League), ESPN has made it an afterthought.

PFL CEO John Martin recently appeared on veteran MMA journalist Ariel Helwani’s podcast and ripped the network for failing to put its promotional humph behind the up-and-coming league.

“ESPN is not doing really anything to promote us. Disappointing, because I was really hopeful coming into the year that they would really help us. They’ve done virtually nothing,” Martin told Helwani.

PFL and ESPN initially began a broadcast partnership in 2019, reaching multiple renewals, the most recent of which came in 2023. Last October, Martin told Sportcal that PFL’s deal would expire in the next 12 months, and his “biggest priority” was to improve the league’s media rights deal on the next go around. His comments to Helwani would seem to suggest ESPN is out of the picture.

“Our audience figures year-on-year is up even though our lead-in going into our fights is down 50%,” Martin said. “So we’re bucking a bad lead-in, and actually our average audience is up. And if you look at the top of the card … our peak viewership is up 37% so far year-on-year, three events, and for the co-main and the main, viewership is up 33%. Now, I would submit those percentages are huge, but the numbers are still too small. So we have to continue to build on that,” the PFL CEO said.

The problem is, PFL is small potatoes for ESPN. The network has plenty of other leagues to promote that will move the needle much more than PFL ever will. And considering the MMA circuit has had six years to prove itself worthy of better promotion from ESPN, but hasn’t performed at a level to warrant that promotion, it’s difficult to blame ESPN.

For much of PFL’s time under the ESPN umbrella, the network was also under contract with UFC, the great white shark in the mid-sized pond of combat sports entities. ESPN likely felt it was more worthwhile to promote UFC than PFL considering the ginormous gap in popularity between the two promotions. And now, even without UFC rights, ESPN is still tied to its parent company TKO through its deal with WWE, so there still might not be much appetite to promote the upstart PFL.