Ronda Rousey said that her upcoming fight with Gina Carano had originally been planned under the UFC banner before agreeing to headline MVP’s first MMA event in May.
Rousey and Carano are each because of return to the game they retired from, the previous after her last fight in 2016 and the latter in 2009. But Rousey said in the course of the press conference for the upcoming fight that they’d originally intended to see it occur in UFC. Though ultimately that turned out to not be the case.
“It’s turn out to be about changing all the landscape of the game and difficult the monolith that the UFC has turn out to be,” Rousey said. “I’m so grateful that Gina trusted me when it wasn’t going to work out with the UFC. I told her, I used to be like, ‘We will do that on our own. We do not need them. We do not need anyone.’ And she or he said, ‘I will follow your lead. I will trust you.’ And that is what led us to MVP, and to Netflix, and to us sitting here to placed on essentially the most viewed MMA fight of all time.”
Carano said that she was first approached with the concept while Rousey was three months pregnant in December 2024, and Rousey added that while she knew they might promote the fight by themselves she approached Dana White with it first out of affection and respect.
“Originally we were going to do Recent 12 months’s, and it was going to be the last fight under the pay-per-view model, and he offered me the perfect pay-per-view structure ever and I used to be so grateful. But then Gina said she needed more time to get into the perfect shape possible and that she wanted me to fight the perfect version of herself. I feel that was fate. It was meant to be,” she said.
Rousey continued to say that, once the UFC had moved from pay-per-view to streaming through Paramount+, White had a fiduciary duty to not stage the perfect fights but to maximise shareholder value. And thus it just made sense for them to stage the match for themselves with the assistance of MVP.