5 reasons why Jake Paul should fight in ONE Championship
Forbes just reported that YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul made more than $40 million in 2021. That, for lack of a better term, is insane. Paul has only amassed five professional fights in his career and yet he's already earning more money than most world champions.
Let's put this ludicrous achievement in perspective. Canelo Alvarez, boxing's current pound-for-pound best and a man with a record of 57-1-2 (39 KOs), made $32 million last year. Yep, we live in a crazy world.
So how did some kid, without any athletic background, start doing a sport and end up getting paid more than the best athlete of said sport? The answer is quite simple: Jake Paul became insanely famous first before becoming a boxer.
Love him or hate him, 'The Problem Child' is one of the most popular people in the world today. His 20 million YouTube subscribers are testament to his undeniable ability to garner attention. If the former Disney star can get 16 million people to watch him Yodeling inside a Walmart, he can pretty much make anyone watch him do anything.
Although he's marvelous at self-promotion and viral in his endeavors, as a boxer, Jake Paul is, in all honesty, still a rookie. He's a pugilist with five fights and should be treated as such, competitively at least. He's undeniably talented and is getting better with every fight. It wouldn't make sense, however, for him to fight Canelo just because they both make eight-figures in the sport.
Jake Paul's last two high-profile opponents, 40-year old Tyron Woodley and the retired Ben Askren, although prominent combat athletes, had zero records in pro boxing. That might be the reason Paul chose those opponents.
Now, this is not a knock on 'The Chosen One' and 'Funky's boxing skills, but MMA is a wildly different sport from the sweet science.
With that said, since 'The Problem Child' has been beefing with and knocking out MMA fighters, he's created a long-standing rivalry with the MMA community. In a post on Twitter, Paul declared that he's willing to retire from boxing and fight MMA if UFC president Dana White agrees to his terms.
Although White has already expressed no interest in signing, working with, or co-promoting with Jake Paul, there are still other MMA leagues that might. The most viable candidate could be Asia's ONE Championship.
Why? We list down five reasons why the Singapore-based organization is the perfect destination for Jake Paul if he wants to branch out of boxing.
#5. Jake Paul can tap into the Asian market
Without trying to sound like Khabib Nurmagomedov's famous post-fight words: North America, 580 million. Asia, 4.6 billion.
Those numbers are enough to tell you that Asia is a goldmine when it comes to getting people to buy anything you're selling. That might be the reason why Floyd Mayweather Jr. came out of retirement to knock out kickboxer Tenshin Nasukawa in Japan for $9 million in 2018.
With the rise of Asian MMA champions like Zhang Weili, Angela Lee and Aung La Nsang, as well as boxing icons like Zou Shiming and Naoya Inoue, Asia is having a martial arts resurgence.
ONE Championship has proudly brought martial arts back to the continent and has already established a foothold in its fight industry. Creating new fans from Asia would certainly mean dollar signs for the budding professional fighter.