Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions has signed Skye Nicolson, the Australian featherweight world champion, to an exclusive promotional agreement. That gives MVP another titleholder in a women’s roster it has been aggressively building. Back home, Nine.com.au ran the news under a headline saying the Aussie had made history by signing with Paul. DAZN’s headline went bigger, billing the addition as a world champion and pound-for-pound star.
The early reports left out a few things. They didn’t include the length of the deal or the money, and nobody has announced an opponent or a date for her first fight under the MVP banner. I’m not going to guess at any of it. When MVP puts a name and a venue on a poster, you’ll hear about it here.
The timing is very MVP. The company is in the middle of hyping Paul’s own return, an eight-round fight with Cédric Doumbé on Christmas Eve at Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai. It’s Paul’s first fight in a year. His last one was the December knockout loss to Anthony Joshua that broke his jaw in multiple places and required multiple surgeries. MVP posted on X that the two will come face-to-face for the first time at a free, open-to-the-public press conference on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at Pavillon Cambon in Paris, streaming on the MVP and PFL YouTube channels. Tickets for the fight go on sale Nov. 15.
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Doumbé is already doing his part. He posted on X, “JAKE PAUL, GET READY FOR YOUR FUNERAL.” Paul, per MMA Fighting, has said he’ll “hang up the gloves” if Doumbé beats him. Not everybody is buying the matchup, though. Darren Till told Ariel Helwani his team had been negotiating with Paul for that same date and that he’d been in camp for two weeks. Till called the Doumbé booking “a fraudulent show” and said he burned about 5,000 pounds flying his coach out.
Paul also spent the week firing at Dana White on X. He mocked the booking of Jai Opetaia, whom he called a top 10 pound-for-pound fighter at 31-0, against a 41-year-old Deontay Wilder on the Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua undercard. So the guy is out there lecturing other promoters about best-versus-best while getting ready to fight a career kickboxer in Dubai on Christmas Eve. You have to admire the nerve.
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My take: This is the part of the Jake Paul business I can defend without squinting. His own fights are a traveling circus, and I say that with love, because I’ll be watching Paris on Tuesday hoping the face-off gets chaotic. Signing a reigning world champion is a different kind of move. Collecting belt holders is how a promotion stops being a YouTuber’s side project and starts getting taken seriously by boxing people. The catch is that a stable of champions only matters if MVP actually matches them against each other and against the best names outside the building. If Paul wants to keep calling out White for padding cards, the cleanest way to win that argument is to book Nicolson in a real fight against a real threat. Somebody at that Nov. 10 press conference should ask him when that’s happening.
