Ronda Rousey criticizes UFC executive for marketing failures

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INGLEWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MAY 16: Ronda Rousey speaks to the media after the main card of Netflix's Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano at Intuit Dome on May 16, 2026 in Inglewood, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images for Netflix) | Getty Images for Netflix Ronda Rousey wants to remind everyone what the UFC could have had. This past May, Rousey and fellow women’s MMA pioneer Gina Carano headlined the inaugural MVP MMA event on Netflix, helping to draw an audience of over 17 million viewers for the main event. Rousey has previously discussed how her former promoters in the UFC were unwilling to commit to a matchup between its former bantamweight champion and Carano, calling UFC Chief Business Officer Hunter Campbell a “chauvinist prick.” Rousey actually feels like she wasn’t critical enough, telling Fight Culture that Campbell’s inability to maximize talent isn’t limited to just female fighters. “It was extremely validating especially after Hunter Campbell told Gina he didn’t know he was going to market a couple of 40-year-olds to her, that’s what he said,” Rousey said. “So it was really nice to kind of take that comment and throw it into his face. “It’s not that he doesn’t know how to market us, it’s he doesn’t know how to market f*cking anybody, and he missed a huge opportunity letting us go because now he, in his own arrogance, basically allowed us to create the Lamborghini to his Ferrari and he created the hugest rival that the UFC is ever going to have just because he’s so arrogant, stupid, and chauvinist.” MVP MMA featured several other former UFC fighters, including BKFC star Mike Perry, Nate Diaz, Francis Ngannou, and Junior dos Santos. While it’s unclear if the event is a one-off or the start of a series of events for Most Valuable Promotions and Netflix, it unquestionably made an impression on fight fans and possibly the UFC who have gone on to sign several fighters that competed on the May 16 card, including Salahdine Parnasse and Robelis Despaigne (Namo Fazil has also been called up to compete on the upcoming season of Dana White’s Contender Series). Rousey was also asked about former Strikeforce boss Scott Coker returning to fight promotion and she spoke positively of the possibility. “I think the more competition the better,” Rousey said. “The more promoters that are getting into and it and getting serious the better. “I think that being a publicly traded company and having the fighters’ best interests at heart is not—You can’t be legally obligated to maximize shareholder value and simultaneously have fighters’ best interest in mind. It’s impossible, so there needs to be other options for other fighters to have. Not that that can’t exist, but that can’t be the only option.” As for the future of MVP MMA, Rousey hasn’t committed to fighting again at all, much less on Netflix, but she hopes that Most Valuable Promotions promotes more events in the future and that Diaz is in tow. “We’ll see,” Rousey said. “We need to kind of reconvene and see what the future looks like at this point. I think everyone is just kind of, like, decompressing and getting back to post-that huge of event fight life and I think what I hope they do in the future, whether with me or not, is that they continue to make their fights a huge event. Every single one a single huge event because that’s what’s missing in MMA. “It’s just becoming every week and background noise and it needs to be an event, so anything that they do next, whether I’m involved or not, I hope that it’s something huge and for something to be huge of that caliber again I think Nate also needs to be involved again. I think he needs to be a mainstay.”