Jake Paul Saved Boxing and Nobody Wants to Admit It
Jake Paul Saved Boxing and Nobody Wants to Admit It
Jake Paul is trending again. This time for something he said on Theo Von’s podcast that has nothing to do with boxing and everything to do with why people love to hate him. We’re not going to get into that here.
What we are going to talk about is what Jake Paul has actually done for the sport that half the internet insists he’s ruining.
Because today, April 5, 2026, his women’s boxing league launched on ESPN. The first MVPW card. Caroline Dubois vs. Terri Harper. Ellie Scotney vs. Mayelli Flores. An all-female fight card streaming live on the ESPN app, with a multi-year broadcast deal locked in through 2028. Forty-three fighters under contract. Sixteen world champions. Twenty-seven top-ranked contenders.
And nobody is talking about it because Jake Paul said something dumb on a podcast.
That’s kind of the whole story with him, isn’t it? The noise is always louder than the work.
The state of boxing before Jake Paul
Boxing was not in a good place. The sport had been bleeding young fans for years. PPV buys were clustered around a shrinking list of aging stars. The promotion model was fractured across too many sanctioning bodies, too many networks, and too many fights that nobody under 30 had any reason to care about.
Deontay Wilder’s rematch with Luis Ortiz in November 2019 drew an estimated 225,000 to 275,000 PPV buys. That was the WBC heavyweight champion, one of the biggest names in the sport, barely cracking a quarter million. The audience was getting older. The casual fan was gone. And the sport’s answer was to keep putting fights behind $80 paywalls on platforms that young people didn’t use.
Then a YouTuber showed up.
What the numbers actually say
Jake Paul’s first professional fight was in January 2020 against fellow YouTuber AnEsonGib. Nobody in the boxing world took it seriously. But the eyeballs were there. And they kept coming back.
He knocked out former NBA player Nate Robinson in November 2020. He knocked out former MMA champion Ben Askren in the first round in April 2021, on an event that Paul claimed drew 1.5 million PPV buys. He beat former UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley twice, the first fight doing an estimated 500,000 buys on Showtime.
None of these were great boxing matches. Nobody is pretending they were. But each one put the sport in front of millions of people who had never watched a boxing card in their lives. Paul was doing Showtime numbers that most legitimate boxers couldn’t sniff.
Then came Anderson Silva. A legitimate combat sports legend. Paul beat him by unanimous decision in October 2022 in front of 200,000 to 300,000 PPV buyers. Then Tommy Fury in February 2023, where Paul took his first loss by split decision, but the fight reportedly sold over 800,000 PPVs.
The pattern was clear. Whatever you thought of the quality, the audience was real. And it was young.
The Tyson fight changed everything
On November 15, 2024, Jake Paul fought Mike Tyson at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The fight streamed live on Netflix.
108 million people watched it live. It peaked at 65 million concurrent streams globally, with 38 million in the U.S. alone. The live-plus-one audience hit 125 million. It was the most-streamed sporting event in history.
The gate was $18.1 million. The largest for any boxing or MMA event outside of Las Vegas in U.S. history, doubling the previous Texas record of $9 million set by Canelo Alvarez vs. Billy Joe Saunders in 2021. Over 72,000 fans were in the building.
And the co-main event? Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano II. That fight averaged 74 million live viewers globally and 47 million in the U.S. alone. It became the most-watched professional women’s sporting event in American history.
That last part matters. A lot.
The women’s boxing part nobody talks about
Jake Paul didn’t just bring eyeballs to his own fights. He built an infrastructure for women’s boxing that didn’t exist before him.
In 2021, Paul and his business partner Nakisa Bidarian signed Amanda Serrano as the first fighter under their Most Valuable Promotions banner. Paul said at the time they were “eyeing a seven-figure payday for Amanda in 2022” to prove that “women need to be paid more in this sport.”
On April 30, 2022, Taylor and Serrano headlined Madison Square Garden. It was the first time two women had ever headlined a boxing card at the Garden. The place sold out. 19,187 fans. The bout was named Fight of the Year by Sports Illustrated and Event of the Year by The Ring.
Paul co-promoted that fight. His company made it happen.
In March 2025, Serrano signed a lifetime contract with MVP. And on March 6, 2026, Paul launched MVPW, a dedicated women’s boxing platform, and announced a multi-year broadcast deal with ESPN. The league has 43 fighters under contract. The first three events run from April through May across London, New York, and El Paso. The Madison Square Garden card on April 17 will air on linear ESPN.
Women’s boxing is on ESPN because of Jake Paul. That’s not an opinion. That’s the broadcast deal.
He’s not a great boxer
Let’s be clear about what Jake Paul is and isn’t.
His professional record is 12-2. His wins include a YouTuber, a basketball player, a string of MMA fighters well past their primes, a 58-year-old Mike Tyson, and a handful of lower-level opponents in between. His two losses are to Tommy Fury (by split decision) and Anthony Joshua (by knockout).
The Joshua fight on December 19, 2025, was the reality check. Joshua dropped Paul twice in the fifth round and twice more in the sixth before the referee counted him out at 1:31 of the sixth. Paul’s jaw was broken in two places. He drove himself to the hospital. Two surgeries followed. Titanium plates were installed on both sides of his jaw.
He’s not a world-class boxer. He knows it. Everyone knows it. That was never the point.
The point
The point is that boxing had a problem it couldn’t solve on its own. The sport was losing fans, losing cultural relevance, and retreating further behind paywalls that only existing fans would pay for. The promotion model was stuck. The young audience was gone.
Jake Paul didn’t fix all of that. But he brought 108 million people to a boxing event on Netflix. He put women’s boxing on ESPN. He made Amanda Serrano a household name. He sold out Madison Square Garden with two women on the poster. He generated the largest non-Vegas combat sports gate in American history.
And he did it while getting his jaw broken in two places by a real heavyweight.
You don’t have to like Jake Paul. Most boxing purists don’t. But the sport is in a better place today than it was five years ago, and a significant part of the reason is the loudmouth YouTuber that the boxing world spent years trying to pretend didn’t matter.
He’s trending today because of something he said on a podcast. He should be trending because his women’s boxing league just launched on the biggest sports network in the country.
That’s the story nobody wants to tell.
A graduate from the University of Texas, Anthony Amador has been credentialed to cover the Houston Texans, Dallas Cowboys, San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Mavericks and high school games all over the Lone Star State. Currently, his primary beats are the NBA, MLB, NFL and UFC.
