Ronda Rousey is making her return to fighting for the first time in almost 10 years, but she won’t be competing in the UFC.
Instead, the former women’s bantamweight champion partnered with Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions and Netflix to book a fight against Gina Carano scheduled for May 16 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif. After the fight was announced, Rousey revealed that she initially reached out to UFC CEO Dana White about facing Carano in the octagon but the two sides just couldn’t
come to an agreement.
At UFC Houston on Saturday, White reacted to the news that Rousey was returning for the Carano fight but she wasn’t competing in the UFC.
“Her and I have been talking about this since last year,” White said about Rousey at the post-fight press conference. “It just didn’t work out. But I’m happy for her.
“Listen, me and Gina are in a really good place, we weren’t at one point. I’m happy for both of them.”
After initially stating that she didn’t strike a deal to return to the UFC, Rousey later claimed it really came down to the financial terms that she was being offered for the fight.
Talks dated back to 2025 before the UFC reached a deal to move from ESPN to Paramount, which included the elimination of the pay-per-view model for the company.
Rousey claimed she was poised to make more money than she ever had before under the agreement she reached with White but then the UFC wouldn’t change that to a guaranteed purse after pay-per-view went away at the start of 2026.
“It no longer made sense for me to go over there because they didn’t want to pay us the money we deserve,” Rousey said. “Because then from the rest of the time the deal, they’re going to have to pay everybody else more. So then I decided to look elsewhere.”
Elsewhere ended up with Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions, who are now leading the charge for the show as Netflix plans to air an MMA card for the first time in history.
Prior to this fight, Netflix actually pursued a broadcast deal with the UFC but the streaming service was only interested in the bigger, marquee pay-per-view cards and not the rest of the Fight Night lineup. In the end, the UFC inked a $7.7 billion deal over seven years to move to Paramount instead.
