Jake Paul has his Christmas Eve opponent, and it’s Cédric Doumbé. Most Valuable Promotions made the fight official on X on Nov. 2: Paul vs. Doumbé, Thursday, Dec. 24, at Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai. Ariel Helwani posted the details within a minute of MVP’s announcement. It’s eight rounds at cruiserweight, and the broadcaster is still to be announced. Tickets go on sale Nov. 15. MVP is selling it as “SANTA VS. THE GRINCH,” which tells you exactly how seriously everyone involved wants you to take the holiday branding.
Doumbé arrives with a strange résumé for a boxing headliner. MVP bills him as a multi-time kickboxing world champion, and Helwani noted he went 63-7-1 in kickboxing before moving to MMA, where he’s 6-1. His last fight of any kind was an MMA win in May 2024. Helwani reported that Doumbé quietly stepped away to focus on family and other personal matters. His boxing record is 1-0, and that one fight was in April 2015. So this is a guy coming off two and a half years of inactivity, stepping into a sport he hasn’t competed in for more than a decade, for eight rounds.
For Paul, it’s his first fight since the AJ bout in December 2025. Helwani said Paul deserves a lot of credit for returning after “that devastating injury.”
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Why this fight, why now
Helwani pointed to the business side. MVP recently merged with PFL, and Doumbé is one of the promotion’s biggest stars. If this fight is the incentive that gets Doumbé back into MMA, Helwani called that a win. He also flagged his biggest concern without dancing around it: Paul is significantly bigger, and that’s hard to overlook.
Darren Till, for one, wasn’t overlooking anything. In clips Helwani posted on X, Till said he was already training to fight Paul on Dec. 24 when the Doumbé news dropped. “I think we agreed on a price... I thought we were all good to go. I’ve been in camp for the past two weeks with my coach,” Till said. He didn’t hold back on the replacement either. “I don’t think anyone outside of his own household even knows who he is.”
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Till went after the weight gap hard, claiming Doumbé is at 170 pounds while Paul sits at 220 to 225. Those are Till’s numbers, not anyone’s official weigh-in. “Once you look past all the smoke and mirrors and the bullshit, what kind of fight is this? It’s a farce again,” he said. He also called Paul a fraud and accused MVP’s Nakisa of wasting his time.
My take: Doumbé is one of the most fun strikers on the planet, and I’ve wanted him back in competition since he disappeared after May 2024. I’d rather it be in a PFL cage at his own weight. Asking an elite kickboxer to spot that kind of size to a cruiserweight, in boxing gloves, after 11 years away from the sport, with eight rounds on the contract, is a lot to stack on one man. Till’s anger is mostly about his paycheck, but his math on the scale is the part that matters. If Doumbé lands clean early, Dubai goes bananas. If he doesn’t, those later rounds could get ugly. We’ll see how the sides talk about weight once tickets open on Nov. 15.
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