Scott Coker reveals tournament format and global schedule for new MMA promotion

Scott Coker, the former president of Bellator MMA and founder of Strikeforce, has provided the clearest picture yet of his new MMA promotion, confirming a tournament format, a globally ambitious event schedule, and $60 million in secured funding. The organisation, whose name has not yet been announced, is set to launch in 2027.

Speaking to the New York Post, Coker said the tournament structure will be central to the promotion’s identity and its strategy for developing new stars. “We’re going to have the tournament format, and the tournament format leads to new-star development,” he said. “And that’s something I think we’re really good at: fighter procurement. I think we’ve done it better than anybody else, but we will bring in free agents to sprinkle from the top down, and that’s going to be a very robust roster, let’s say, in a year or two.”

Coker laid out a three-year growth plan for the number of events: 12 in 2027, rising to 18 in 2028, and 22 in 2029. The promotion intends to operate across multiple continents from the outset. “There’s really no country we can’t go,” Coker said. “We’re gonna go to several countries in Europe to start; we’re gonna go to Asia and we’re gonna come here to North America and do fights in the San Francisco Bay area where I live. Then we’ll go to New York or L.A. — maybe we’ll end up in Honolulu if we do it right.”

On the subject of funding, Coker confirmed the promotion raised $60 million but said investors were prepared to commit more. He chose to cap the figure deliberately to protect the founding team’s control of the company. “We capped it at [$60 million]. We said, ‘That’s it,’ because then there’d be a dilution issue between me and my partners,” he said. “I didn’t want the investors to have more control than we did. We want to have control of the company.”

Coker also dismissed a rumour that the promotion would be called Strike MMA, though no official name has been confirmed. He said a formal announcement of the leadership team is forthcoming, and expressed confidence that his four decades of experience running major organisations had prepared him for the scale of the project.

“Most people, if you said six months, worldwide global league, it’d be impossible,” Coker said. “But you know what? Over the last four decades, all that experience in Strikeforce, all that experience in [Bellator] MMA, all that experience has led me to this point in my life where I can execute this. So I felt very, very good about it.”