One week after making headlines by adding undisputed junior lightweight champion Alycia Baumgardner to its roster, Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions has only continued its commitment to elevating women’s boxing by signing four more female fighters on Wednesday.
MVP, which extended seven-division champion Amanda Serrano’s contract into a lifetime deal earlier this month, launched in 2021 and has already built a respected roster of women’s boxers, which includes WBO super middleweight titleholder Shadasia Green. The promotion was also responsible for making Serrano’s big-money rematch with Katie Taylor last November the most-watched women’s sporting event in American history (with a trilogy bout set for July 11 on Netflix in New York’s Madison Square Garden).
The newest signings for MVP are:
- Dina Thorslund (23-0, 9 KOs): The 31-year-old unified bantamweight champion and two-division titleholder from Denmark who is currently ranked by BoxRec.com as the No. 1 pound-for-pound women’s fighter in all of boxing.
- Ramla Ali (9-2, 2 KOs): A Somali-British fighter, activist and fashion model, the 35-year-old junior featherweight became the first female boxer to represent Somalia at the Olympics at the 2020 Tokyo Games and was one of 12 leaders named as TIME’s 2023 women of the year due to her fight for women’s equality.
- Naomy Valle (14-0, 9 KOs): The 20-year-old native of Costa Rica is a junior flyweight prospect who is versatile outside the ring as an aspiring pilot and recent winner of a popular dance competition show in her native country (where she donated the $15,000 prize to the National Children’s Hospital).
- Nat “No Love” Dove (4-0, 0 KOs): The 15-time U.S. national amateur champion, 23, is a junior bantamweight top prospect from Philadelphia and a training partner of 18-year-old actor and MVP-signed boxer Javon “Wanna” Walton.
Nakisa Bidarian, who co-founded MVP with Paul nearly four years ago, said the promotion launched with three priorities in mind: Be fighter first, give boxers a platform to get their name out there using Paul’s massive social media reach as a top influencer and to elevate the platform for female fighters.
“Our focus on women’s boxing isn’t something that is new. It’s something that has been planned, calculated and intentional from the outset,” Bidarian told CBS Sports this week. “We champion it day in and day out. Every step that we take within boxing is driven by thinking about how can we develop the women’s vertical within the sport.”
Bidarian, a former chief financial and strategy officer with UFC, saw firsthand the rise of Ronda Rousey from her 2013 debut in the first women’s match in UFC history to a level of crossover superstardom and financial success that Bidarian said has only been topped by tennis star Serena Williams. And in boxing, Bidarian saw an opportunity to create a platform that could ultimately lead to a true meritocracy from a financial standpoint that is comparable to men.
In addition, MVP took notice of how little effort was being put in by top global promotions to prioritize female boxers outside of the few crossover names like Taylor, a 2012 Olympic gold medalist and Irish sporting hero who is promoted by Matchroom Sport, and two-time American gold medalist Claressa Shields of Salita Promotions, who has won titles in five weight divisions and was recently the subject of a 2024 biopic “The Fire Inside.”
“Ronda Rousey was the top paid fighter in the UFC in 2015, more than Conor McGregor,” Bidarian said. “That’s an astonishing thing in sports to have and we want to basically create an organization that has all of the top talent within women’s boxing and kind of breaks down the barriers of making fights across different promoters and different networks without a need to get rid of any sanctioning bodies. That’s the unique opportunity here.”
When MVP brought Paul, a former Disney child actor and YouTube sensation, to the pay-per-view level with Showtime in 2021, for Paul’s first of two boxing matches with former UFC champion Tyron Woodley, Bidarian said the network was “taken a bit aback” by his suggestion of booking a women’s boxing match in the co-main event.
Bidarian ultimately credited former Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza for suggesting that he look into Serrano (47-3-1, 31 KOs), now 36, who had built already built a Hall-of-Fame resume over multiple weight classes but had yet to be featured or paid anything remotely close to her accomplishments and potential worth as an attraction.
Serrano, who is currently a unified featherweight champion, scored a decision win over Yamileth Mercado in her MVP debut in 2021 and would go on to become a fixture within the promotion alongside Paul. And although Serrano has twice dropped highly disputed decisions to Taylor in a pair of blockbuster matches that could be called the two biggest and most important in women’s boxing history, the relationship led to her signing a lifetime deal with that will see Serrano eventually transition into a front office role with the promotion.
“[Serrano] is being rewarded for her past contributions to the sport but also her future contributions,” Bidarian said. “When you have athletes like Amanda, they need to be treated that way. It’s no different than Conor McGregor, who I hope UFC would consider giving a lifetime deal and give him the rewards for what he has contributed to that company. It also says that there is lots more to come for her to make the biggest payday in women’s sports history but that’s not the end of the story.
“There are many more fights to come, as long as she wants to keep going, and we believe that she does. And when she’s done in the ring, we will have her transition to lead our women’s efforts on a chairperson level and continue to take advantage of her expertise within the sport.”
MVP’s biggest strategic move toward the evolution of women’s boxing came last November at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, when Taylor-Serrano II served as the co-main event to Paul’s boxing match against 58-year-old former two-time heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. The fight card served as streaming giant Netflix’s debut in combat sports.
Although the main event was rightfully criticized due to Tyson’s age and physical shape, which Bidarian acknowledges, it was the Taylor-Serrano rematch that clearly stole the show in terms of both entertainment value and viewership.
“My team sent me an interview I did three weeks before Paul-Tyson where I said, unequivocally, this will be the biggest viewed women’s sporting event in the history of the United States,” Bidarian said. “We blew away the World Cup numbers that Fox had achieved in 1999. Over 45 million people were watching Amanda and Katie in the U.S. and that was the most strategic part of that play, to give the athletes their time and their shine and then convert that into ongoing opportunities. We did the first professional sporting event on Netflix and now we are doing the first-ever women’s sporting event on Netflix [on July 11].”
It isn’t lost on Bidarian that Netflix’s decision to secure exclusive U.S. rights to the FIFA women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031, which was announced in December, was helped along by the success of Taylor-Serrano II.
“We feel great about that and it has really made us understand the power of great product,” Bidarian said. “No one could deny that Katie and Amanda were the best two athletes that night and the next day, we started to implement our strategy and the strategy is so different than anyone else.”
While MVP hasn’t completely cornered the market, it has continued to seek out possible names to add to its growing stable and is willing to work with others, as it has throughout the Taylor-Serrano rivalry with Matchroom, to make the biggest fights possible.
“[There is] a lack of attention and focus that goes into this sport for the women and there are opportunities for us to take advantage of them authentically,” Bidarian said. “A week from now, promoters may pop up and say they want to focus on women’s boxing and they may get a few athletes to sign with them because they throw them attractive promotional agreements. But any female athlete that pays attention can clearly see that Jake, myself and MVP have a genuine passion, interest and desire to build women’s boxing the right way.”
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