Arman Tsarukyan sat down for a meal in Spain with Eddie Hearn, the boxing promoter who has spent the past few months poaching UFC names for his new management outfit. Dana White probably didn’t need the photo to ruin his weekend, but Hearn posted one anyway.
Hearn put the picture on Instagram Friday morning. It shows him with Tsarukyan and some members of the lightweight contender’s team. The caption was a single handshake emoji, which is the kind of announcement I have sworn to hate and will now spend 400 words writing about.
Nobody has said what the handshake actually means. Bloody Elbow reported the meeting and noted that Hearn appeared to be hinting some business got done, but neither man has spelled it out. Tsarukyan has been in Marbella for reasons nobody has explained. Hearn is there to meet with Anthony Joshua ahead of his heavyweight super-fight with Tyson Fury, so at least one of them had a work excuse.
Hearn’s growing UFC roster
The context matters here. Hearn launched Matchroom Talent as a management stable for MMA fighters, and he went shopping in the UFC’s backyard right away. Former heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall was the first signing. Welterweight contender Ian Machado Garry came next. Light heavyweight contender Paulo Costa is reportedly in the process of joining, and the stable has reportedly drawn interest from hundreds of MMA fighters.
All of it traces back to White’s move into boxing with Zuffa Boxing. Hearn and White have been feuding ever since, and it got personal when Zuffa pried Conor Benn, one of Matchroom’s biggest stars, away with a mega-money offer. Hearn answered by building Matchroom Talent and signing Aspinall. Tit for tat, except the tats keep getting bigger.
Why Tsarukyan would be the big one
Tsarukyan would be a different kind of get. He has spent the last two years turning himself into a star outside the cage, streaming, grinding on social media and competing nonstop in RAF Wrestling and grappling matches. Bloody Elbow puts his following at almost 10 million across platforms. That’s a fighter who already thinks like a business, and a promoter who manages Joshua would know exactly what to do with that audience.
To be clear about what we have and what we don’t: we have a meal, a photo and an emoji. We don’t have a signed deal, a statement from Tsarukyan or a word from the UFC.
My take is simple. If Hearn lands Tsarukyan, the Aspinall and Garry signings stop looking like a stunt and start looking like a pipeline running straight through White’s best divisions. If he doesn’t, he still got a free week of headlines out of one dinner in Marbella. Either way, Hearn knows exactly what a handshake emoji does to a man in Las Vegas, and somebody in Tsarukyan’s camp should just tell us what was on the table besides the food.
