Jake Paul has drawn the ire of boxing and MMA onlookers from around the world but when it comes to strategy it doesn’t matter what character he assumes and it doesn’t matter what character he actually is, what matters is the play that he’s orchestrating and he is doing something masterful right now.
What he is doing is making real boxing money and he’s doing it by arbitraging in MMA fighters and isolating them into just a boxing match.
So there are a few things to unpack here but what’s being missed by so many people is they’re focused in on his polarizing behavior but not what he’s actually doing and the beauty for Jake Paul is he’s already won the game.
And it’s not just by the boxing matches that he’s won had his hand raised in at at just 25 years old he’s parlayed his social media influence influence and fame into tens of millions of dollars and he’s got an upcoming match against MMA legend Anderson Silva that is going to make him even more money.
And he probably – and I don’t think it’s going to stop there even if he loses but specific to this podcast I went ahead and I looked at the last two years of his assistant which includes 3 boxing matches against two MMA fighters and now he has the third match another batch match booked with Anderson Silva but this this rise was not happenstance so let’s let’s examine Jake Paul’s simple but highly effective strategy.
So first Jake Paul is only focused on boxing and that’s very very key to this all working out because none of this works if Jake Paul is a poor boxer. So he has had to put in real work and effort in the gym to make sure that he is competent at boxing now I’ve talked to numerous boxing people people that are knowledgeable about boxing in our red on it as well Jake Paul is not an elite level boxer he’s not even really a good professional boxer but he is a competent boxer who by by hyper focusing on boxing he is now better than that at that particular angle of fighting than the fighters that he hand selects are.
So first he makes everything possible by training hard at one thing boxing second and here’s where the money is made: he is luring in MMA fighters into the boxing ring and very importantly he highlights the match as a fight.
That is where if there’s any slight of hand here that’s the slight of hand it’s characterizing a boxing match which is more of a sport a combat sport as a fight where a fight is where there are few if no rules so in the MMA world obviously there are some rules when in the UFC fighters get into the Octagon but it’s limited in its rules and there are you can use any number of combat techniques whereas in boxing you are simply going back and forth and throwing punches and that’s it.
So by doing this Paul is able to isolate one aspect of fighting and he’s able to hyper focus in on it and become proficient proficient in it and proficient enough to beat the MMA fighters that he selected so far.
Jake Paul first fought Ben askren who is a retired MMA fighter who is known for his dominant wrestling style and in fact Askren’s fighting style is almost solely consists of wrestling he may very well have been the single worst boxer in all of MMA. But what a perfect opponent to start with and so it was very calculated that this initial foray would be the initial boxing spotlight for Paul.
It gives him a a a broad audience right because and here’s the – here’s the arbitrage play: Paul is taking in under, well we can’t necessarily call them underpaid, but within the market fighters are poorly are there relatively received little pay and and really that is relative to their notoriety and perhaps their skill but Askren was a fairly known well known wrestler who had a decent amount of media exposure when he got to the UFC.
The important part of it though is that he was a UFC fighter and everybody knows that UFC fighters are extremely talented and they are able to fight. They are among the best fighters in the world whether or not they look good against each other they are among the type top fighters in the world so Ben Askren had that media exposure in that media pushed from the UFC known as a tough guy known as a wrestler not a striker, but so what?
He still known as a fighter so Paul gets him in great starting point easily makes work quick work of bid ask but is able to pull in that notoriety especially because Askren was very active on social media and made a lot of commentary. I think – I believe he had at least 200,000 followers on Twitter at at the time where the match was being promoted and so Paul was able to capitalize on that and not have to pay Askren that much because in MMA fighters don’t make that much relative to boxers so I don’t remember what Askren got paid – somewhere around the 500,000 mark but that’s not that much for a fight where Paul was able to blow it up into such an occasion.
Askren had retired from in may for over a year before the bout and had had hip surgery following retirement um but with his notoriety in his social media following, on April 17th 2021, Askren got that $500,000 purse pool one catapulted him because there was even doubt whether he could beat Askren, as bad as Askren was as the striker.
Paul next engaged with a person who had become he had become part of the Askren circus the media circus leading up to the event and even after was asking his friend, Tyron Woodley.
Tyron Woodley did have a reputation that he could strike in particularly with his right hand he had knockout power and so Paul next chose him as a foe and although Woodley had ended his career on a him a career on a four or five losing streak at his apex, he was the most feared fighter in the UFC welterweight division and not only won the UFC title but successfully defended it on four different occasions.
So this was a real opponent that people were genuinely interested to see if Paul could back up his trash talk and the danger was with Woodley’s right hand could have curtailed pause budding I don’t know what we call it like social media slash boxing career right away but that didn’t happen in the first match, Paul won a decision.
And then due to circumstances with his next opponent Tyron stepped in again and this time Paul KO’d Woodley so that was a big big knockout for Jake Paul and has led to him going against Anderson Silva who Dana White had previously said that Paul would be too afraid to match up with, that Paul would never match up with him because he was too good of a striker.
So it’s really set a nice stage for Paul but what I think is last is our two things one Jake Paul is this is a great arbitrage strategy to pull in relatively underpaid ma fighters into the boxing ring take advantage of their notoriety of toughness and ability to fight isolate this skill that they have not concentrated in into one that he has poured numerous amounts of energy and in time and attention to.
And win those bouts and then keep leveling up using all of the resources that he has built and that are at his his disposal along the way and he just keeps making money and he’s already won the game.
And now everybody watches to see what will happen because he is of interest so Jake Paul thought outside of the box he didn’t go through the traditional avenues and that has ruffled a lot of people especially those that are entrenched within the boxing and communities and Paul has been very polarizing and what he has said but Paul knows exactly what he’s doing.
He knows that he can’t garner the type of attention that he needs to make millions or tens of millions of dollars in these matches unless he says things that are going to be polarizing that are going to make people mad and that are going to disrupt how things are normally done.
And if you’ve noticed he’s already been successful he’s got Dana White talking about him, he’s got boxing traditionalists mad at him saying he won’t fight this person or that person.
Of course he won’t, he’s not he knows he’s not a professional boxer and he knows I mean, he might be technically professional boxer, but he knows he doesn’t belong amongst those elite boxers but what he does know is how to make money and how to strategize and how to market this into something that people are genuinely interested in and want to watch.
I think his strategy is entirely clever and he has been the one person in decades that has taken too rigid industries one in which fighters have had such difficulty in making money in and he’s been able to make a lot of money and in turn I haven’t read enough on about it but he might just he has his own promotion he couldn’t he he is now the one who is in charge of the cards and he’s the one headline here.
He’s doing a lot of things right and he’s doing them all at once and he doesn’t have to be perfect though what he has to do is be interesting and right now he’s captivating two different sports and the way he’s gone about it I’m sure some of this is incidental, but there there is too much that is going right for it to be for this to be all an accident he’s done a masterful job at beating the game and thinking outside of the box so that he can propel himself and he’s already won the game.
This – it’s all house money from here even if he loses to Anderson Silva what are you going to say well what what is the the criticism going to be? Well, Jake Paul lost to a 47 year old MMA legend who many consider the one of the greatest mixed martial art martial artists of all-time?
That’s not a knock on him and really even if he lost to someone else who had a lesser status that also wouldn’t be a knock on him because he’s not an elite fighter so when I say fighter I’m talking about mixed martial arts he’s not a fighter he might call his fights he might call his boxing matches a fight.
But they’re not fights they are boxing matches that’s all they are and he knows that if he were to fight and I say fight because it’s it’s a natural it’s a natural slang for boxing but boxing is not a fight a fight encompasses everything everything is on the table so it’s not a fight to boxing match but if you were to get into a boxing match with other high level boxers he’s going to lose at this point.
He’s just not there but it’s OK he knows that and that’s not the game anyway.
What’s being lost is Jake Paul is playing a different game than everyone else and he is relishing in the fact that he has people so emotionally charged and invested in his demise or success he that’s what he needs. He needs people to be interested in the outcome of his boxing matches and he’s accomplished that so he’s already won and now it’s just a matter of how much he’s going to win.