Scott Coker is back, and he’s bringing the ol’ Strikeforce gang with him for a new MMA promotion that will debut at the start of 2027.
Those who have been around for a while will remember Coker as the man who brought MMA to California with Strikeforce’s huge Frank Shamrock vs. Cesar Gracie fight. Over the years Strikeforce held a bunch of big events and developed stars like Ronda Rousey, Daniel Cormier, Nick Diaz, Luke Rockhold, Cung Le and Cris Cyborg. Strikeforce was a legit No. 2 to UFC back in
2011 when the UFC bought it out from under Coker, making an offer to the promotion’s co-owners that they couldn’t refuse.
Coker would return to help run Bellator, but was never really the man in charge and clearly chaffed under the control of Viacom owners, who never allowed the promotion to grow outside of the constraints of their corporate roadmap.
Now Coker is back with many of his original Strikeforce team and plans to run twelve events per year with a roster of over a hundred fighters. And while he’s realistic about the MMA landscape and UFC’s place as the Goliath in the sport, he also believes he can carve out a niche and shake things up a little.
“I feel like there’s a little bit of a funk in the MMA space right now,” Coker said on the Ariel Helwani Show. “And I don’t know what it is. But I just feel it’s it’s got a funk to it right now. So, you know, let’s go stir it up. The thing with MVP, their show, they’re stirring it up. It gets people excited. It gets people to root for somebody. And then we’re we’re gonna do the same. People are gonna root for us too, and we’re gonna go stir it up.”
“So to me, I think the sport needs a little bit of shaking the cage. And that’s something that we’re really good at.”
When asked about the UFC’s current product, Coker suggested it had gotten bland.
“I mean, to me, it looks consistent,” he said. “It’s kind of weird because if you say, ‘Name four champions from UFC in the weight classes,’ I don’t think I could do it right now. And I think a lot of my friends can’t do it right now. So it’s just something, I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s too much. It’s on every week, in front of your face too much. Over-saturation. Maybe it is.”
There’s method to the UFC’s madness, though. That over-saturation has helped keep other MMA promotions from gaining a toehold on the treacherous mountain to MMA profitability. But Coker already knows how to run an MMA company in the black.
“There’s a learning curve in this business, and if you don’t know it, you’re gonna be paying crazy money out because you don’t know it,” Coker said. “And you know what? I’ve been in the business almost four decades, or over four decades now. I know this business.”
Coker said he turned down over $40 million in funding because he simply doesn’t need that much money to get this new venture going.
“We said no, I don’t want it,” he said. “Because I don’t want to be diluted to where I don’t control the company. This isn’t going to be my company the way I want to run it … I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m going to be losing control of this company because I don’t ever want that to happen. So we turned them away. We turned away $40 million.”
We’ll see what Coker can do in today’s MMA space with the UFC taking up so much oxygen and so many of the top fighters. But based on his track record where he was the man in charge, we can see him doing exactly what he’s said he’d do: shake things up a little, and maybe add some fun to a sport that’s gotten a little stale and funky as TKO focuses more on taking over boxing than making MMA as big as it could be.
