First Things First

Since I wrote about how ONE Championship is hurting grappling a lot of people have reached out to me to reaffirm my concerns and raise complaints about the organization. To end the year I decided to do a major round up on ONE’s story, the inconsistencies, and the truth about their future.

Never has the phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” been more true.

The Tragedy Of ONE’s Hubris

Combat sports is a shady business. Executives exploit their impoverished talent, coaches actively set up gambling schemes around their fighters, and the contests themselves can literally be struggles of life and death.

Despite the negatives that tend to come with combat sports, they are responsible for some of the most inspiring human interest stories you’ll ever hear.

Combat sports facilitate men and women momentarily becoming gods and goddesses as they ascend the ranks to change their fortune. One of the faces of MMA, Francis Ngannou, literally grew up mining sand and now he’s a multi-millionaire that almost won a boxing world title in his first professional boxing match. Even writing that is hard because of how outlandish it reads.

Every now and again, a different type of combat sports character emerges. A person that wants to create a platform that will catapult you to greener pastures. They’re not in the game for the violence, and certainly not for the money. They found themselves in martial arts because of what it does for the human spirit.

This newest character and their platform is the subject of today’s article, Chatri Trisiripisal, aka Chatri Sityodtong, and ONE Championship.

Chatri is himself a larger than life character. The Thai man survived the Asian financial crisis to attend Harvard Business School, launch an e-commerce business with his friends, and make a fortune running a hedge fund. Along the way, Chatri trained Muay Thai, taught the sport to make money, and even fought professionally. With full pockets but an empty soul, Chatri would go on to found the global sports property he is known for today, ONE Championship.

This datsusara story is touching but it’s short one major component; truth.

How much of this story is real? More specifically, what is true and what is designed to promote ONE as the next hot investment property to relatively ignorant, optimistic, and gullible investors?

We’re going to get into all of that and ONE’s future. First, let’s talk about where we are today.

ONE Championship Today

ONE Championship has a unique place in MMA. I’d rank them tied for second with the PFL, just behind the UFC. More importantly, ONE has the most differentiated product to sell to fight fans.

ONE Championship promotes MMA fights with rules different than the UFC’s, kickboxing, Muay Thai in MMA gloves, and submission grappling contests all under one banner. They also broadcast fights on Youtube and Amazon Prime, making them incredibly accessible.

The fights ONE promotes are legitimately some of the most exciting events across all of combat sports. As a Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach, I’m happy to see ONE putting grapplers on larger stages with purses that exceed anything else that they could reasonably earn.

For instance, Mikey Musumeci is ONE Championship’s Flyweight Submission Grappling World Champion. I don’t know what his contracted pay is, but I do know that Musumeci has won a $50,000 bonus four times from ONE in less than twenty-four months.

To put it in perspective, the most prestigious submission grappling event in the world, the ADCC World Championships, pays $10,000 to the weight class winner, but it only happen every two years. This means that in between the scheduled ADCC World Championship events, Musumeci generated five times the amount of money in ONE that he could have hoped to earn winning an ADCC title.

When you start looking past the headlines, ONE’s story gets a bit less appealing.

The Reality Of ONE’s Business Performance

I started following ONE’s business practices when I started judging professional grappling events for FloGrappling’s WNO. WNO was having a difficult time signing grapplers to matches in part because ONE’s contracts forbid athletes from competing outside of the organization.

In MMA, fighters’ contracts prevent them from fighting in other organizations. So while ONE’s contract structure is not the norm in professional grappling, we should be willing to give them a pass as long as they regularly get more matches, and more money, to athletes. That isn’t what’s happening.

High profile grapplers like Diego Oliveira, Tainan Dalpra, and Gordon Ryan were all signed to compete for ONE. At the time of writing this literally none of them have received a single match. In Ryan’s case, he didn’t get anything for two years. As best I can tell, all three have left the organization behind. You can scan ONE’s roster and come across any number of athletes that get one match before getting shelved.

There is no scenario where a contractual inability to compete is a good thing for an able bodied professional fighter. Professional fighters have roughly a ten year window to maximize their earnings. Losing ten to twenty percent of that could be disastrous for their career, and the rest of their life.

You can say my occasional gigs with Flo make me an unreliable narrator if you want. You can use that logic to ignore what I’m writing. What you can’t ignore is the jaw-droppingly abysmal state of ONE’s finances.

I’ll save you some time with the math.

By the end of 2021, ONE’s year over year revenue grew at 19%. Their losses before taxes grew at 127%. Perhaps more worryingly is that ONE’s total fundraising efforts have yielded $515 million against over $100 million in yearly losses and $383 million in total losses as of 2021. For what it’s worth, ONE has since moved their business from Singapore to the Cayman Islands effectively eliminating transparent access to their financials.

Half a billion dollars is an absolutely absurd amount of money to raise for a sports start-up whose costs seems to grow linearly. You might be wondering, how did it get this far?

ONE Championship’s Captain

The face of ONE Championship is Chatri Trisiripisal, more commonly known as Chatri Sityodtong. Born a troubled kid in Thailand, Chatri found martial arts after his father took him to the Sityodtong Muay Thai gym. The experience was so impactful Chatri eventually took the name Sityodtong to honor the namesake of the gym.

Tragically, Chatri’s family would lose their life savings in the Asian Financial crisis of the 90’s. The young man found find a glimmer of hope in being accepted to Harvard Business School.

Pushed by his mother, Chatri would attend Harvard and meet his friend Sourabh Mittal. The two would start and sell a technology company, Nextdoor Networks, and Chatri parlayed that into a career change working on wall street.

After a eureka moment, Chatri realized that some of the most valuable businesses in the world were sports teams and leagues. More importantly, there was no Asian billion dollar sports property.

With unlimited financial success but no fulfillment, Chatri decided to dedicate the rest of his life to martial arts by creating the first major Asian sports property, ONE Championship, thereby uniting the region in the ring. ONE Championship would allow Chatri to pursue his passion while putting money into the pockets of relatively impoverished martial artists like the Thai trainers that gave his life purpose decades ago.

Today, Chatri sits at the helm of this billion dollar sports property, ONE Championship, as he introduces the world to the value of Muay Thai, promotes true martial artists, and allows for these warriors to finally receive the revenue they deserve.

Or so he’d like you to believe.

I’ve only worked with one person that went to Harvard Business School. In their words, “Harvard Business School is great, but on your first day they teach you it’s really 2/3 BS.”

Inconsistent At Best

Since covering ONE Championship, several former colleagues of ONE have reached out to vent about Chatri and the organization. I don’t want to play a game of he-say, she-say, but I do think it’s important to clearly say Chatri is inconsistent with his story at best.

Some reports claim Chatri grew up poor. Then in different interviews he says he grew up well off.

At the beginning of ONE Championship Chatri didn’t exist. Victor Cui was the CEO and founder with big dreams while Chatri was affiliated through the gym he founded, Evolve MMA, and the online program, Evolve University. At some point ONE became Chatri’s dream all along.

Ultimately, Chatri’s biggest inconsistencies come from the performance, revenue, and value of ONE Championship.

After the previously cited financials came out, Chatri took to Ariel Helwani’s platform to tell people to ignore what they read on MMA sites and instead look at Bloomberg and Financial Times. He went on to claim he’ll raise another billion dollars and this is all part of the master plan.

Chatri’s argument conveniently dodges that Bloody Elbow was using ONE’s own financial reporting through ACRA, the Singaporean equivalent of the SEC.

You might call this outright lying. I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, but, I might be more charitable and say this is just part of the game he’s playing. Chatri needs to sell investors on him and his story so they ignore the financial performance of the company he’s leading.

The fact of the matter is, information surrounding Chatri’s biography and ONE’s development is either self-produced propaganda, vitriolic criticism, or not verifiable by a third party. This seems to be by design.

You’d think someone that went to Harvard, sold a tech company, was a hot shot on Wall Street, and started one of the nicest MMA gyms in the world would have a bigger online profile. Especially someone that puts themselves into the limelight so much. That’s actually part of the problem though.

There is a hidden in plain sight tactic of self-producing media to drown out negative press. By effectively exploiting search engine optimization, you can make yourself appear to be whoever you want to be and hide who you don’t. Favorable noise can hide the signals you don’t like.

If you’re interested in this phenomenon, I’d recommend reading the excellent books, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and Trust Me, I’m Lying. Jon Ronson’s and Ryan Holiday’s books present some excellent explanations of how people hijack SEO to create, reshape, and own narratives.

For example, look at Chatri’s website and completely bland blog. Whenever you search a topic about Chatri and ONE, the search results will be littered with irrelevant self-aggrandizing media. Just look at the recent news cycle highlighting ONE.

Deal Street Asia recently put out a report that ONE made a new pitch to QIA, the Qatari Investment Authority, for additional funding. The article went on to say that the Qataris are embarrassed by their investment in ONE.

Within two weeks, Chatri had another story out in the larger publication, South China Morning Post, that the Qataris weren’t embarrassed, ONE was on track to generate $100 million in revenue in 2024, and “You can’t believe everything you read.” I truly can’t think of a clearer example of sports propaganda.

After following ONE so closely this year I’m left wondering if they’ll even finish 2024.

ONE More Year Left

Let’s be blunt. ONE cannot continue operations unless they continue to raise money or something about their business model drastically changes.

The last year of financial reporting we have from ONE shows them getting less efficient as time goes on. If your costs grow faster than your revenue eventually your business is going to break, unless you can continue to bring in outside funding. It really is that simple.

ONE has raised just over $500 million with their last reported yearly losses coming in above $100 million. That’s with total losses exceeding $380 million.

To be fair, it’s not like ONE expected to be profitable right now. It seems like the goal for the business was to create a property that does not rely on ticket sales to generate income. When CNBC Managing Asia asked Chatri about ONE’s revenue structure, he explained:

Those closer to the source have been saying ONE’s runway will end in 2024. The PFL’s Mike Kogan actually came out and said it publicly on Ariel Helwani’s show.

It isn’t all bad news lately. This week, season 2 of the Apprentice: ONE Championship debuts on Netflix, with Chatri front and center. The reality show debut comes on the heels of a recently announced partnership between ONE and Sky Sports.

Those closer to the Sky Sports announcement are calling it less of a partnership and more of a paid deal. The combination of the two stories seem like a play to get investors interested in ONE as they near the end of their runway.

Even after all of this insanity I’m legitimately sad that ONE appears to be on their last leg.

An Open Good-Bye Letter

Call me a mark but I like ONE Championship. I want to believe the story, I want to see great action from more obscure martial arts, and I want fighters to get paid more. And, just to play devil’s advocate, Chatri has been pretty transparent about the mission of the company. The story has always been about elevating martial arts.

I guess it the unspoken part of that mission was “At the expense of our investors.” Now, ONE’s story is turning into a literal tragedy.

Tragedy is defined as the branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual. I’m not saying Chatri Sityodtong is a hero, but the myth he created is heroic.

Getting more money to more athletes is a noble cause. The truth that falls short of this noble cause is just disappointing.

Literally as I was editing this, Bibiano Fernandes, the fighter that holds ONE Championship’s record for title fight wins, released an interview advising fighters to think twice before signing with ONE. He went on to say his contract prevents him from going into further details.

So, while I want more fighters to make more money, and, consequently, to believe ONE’s story I can’t just ignore Fernandes’s story, much like I can’t ignore the reports of threats, gag orders, and bullying that surround ONE Championship. What ONE is doing just is not right.

Lying to the public and locking fighters away behind restrictive contracts prevents people at all levels from earning the money they need to survive. I can’t be the only one that finds it slightly ironic that a man whose personal narrative is centered around a financial crisis is actively causing a small financial crisis in the fight world themselves.

To any mixed martial arts fans that are reading this, I’m not going to tell you whether or not you should or should not support ONE. Frankly the fights are awesome.

To any investors reading this, just do your due diligence. If any company shows meaningful period over period growth you would be stupid not to make the intelligent investment decision. More to the point, as the wealth of Asian countries increase, ONE seems more and more like a promising opportunity. An Asian sports property sounds like a good idea.

To Chatri, I feel a confusing kinship with you. My family lost their home in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis like your family lost their wealth in the Asian financial crisis. I was briefly homeless living on my friend’s couch, and, like you, found refuge in martial arts.

I am an optimist, maybe a naive one. As an optimist I believe that you tried to create a valuable sports property that would put money into the pockets of impoverished MMA trainers and fighters, and that the ends would justify the means. As a rationalist I can confidently say that’s not what’s happening. More importantly, those ends don’t justify your means.

You’ve exploited the name and labor of the marginalized group of people you claim to want to support. Worse yet, you’ve shackled them to the sinking ship you captain. You’re lying to fighters, investors, fans, and, worst of all, it seems like you’re lying to yourself.

You flew too close to the sun and it breaks my heart to see you fall.

Citations & Further Reading

Don’t believe me? Read for yourself and formulate your own opinion.

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