Campbell McLaren

Campbell McLaren books fights for a living, and lately the fighters keep being women. "Am I a feminist? Absolutely," he says, with the same flat conviction he once used to sell the idea that a cage match could be the future of pay-per-view. At Combate Global, the company he founded in 2011 and still runs as CEO, the 125-pound division is, in his words, "the best in the world." He is not a man given to hedging.

That certainty has a price tag attached to it. In 2024 Forbes ranked Combate Global the tenth most valuable combat sports organization on the planet, somewhere near $120 million. The number is satisfying for a specific reason: it is the second fight empire McLaren has built, and this time he owns the thing.

The first one got away. In 1993, McLaren was head of programming at Semaphore Entertainment Group, a pay-per-view shop, when a man named Art Davie called about a martial-arts tournament Rorion Gracie wanted to stage - something called "War of the Worlds." Most executives would have heard a niche curiosity. McLaren heard Mortal Kombat. He imagined the video game made flesh: different disciplines, one cage, find out who actually wins. The Ultimate Fighting Championship premiered on November 12, 1993, and McLaren personally produced the first 22 events, all the way to UFC 22 in June 2000.

The slogan that built it and nearly buried it

He gave it the line that did the work: "There Are No Rules." Then he handed the New York Times a sentence that should be taught in marketing schools - "Death is cheap. Maybe it's just 14.95." The buyrate spiked. So did the outrage. Senator John McCain called it human cockfighting and got it banned in state after state. The provocation that launched the sport almost ended it.

McLaren has the rare distinction of having picked the talent that outlasted him. On UFC 12, he chose a stand-up comic named Joe Rogan to handle post-fight interviews. "Campbell McLaren is amazing," Rogan would later say. "He's a great guy." The microphone McLaren handed him became one of the most recognizable voices in American sports.

Then came the part that stings. In 2000 the UFC was sold for $2 million. McLaren was an employee. He made nothing. The franchise he co-created would eventually change hands for billions; he watched it happen from the outside.

Build it twice

Most people would have told that story for the rest of their lives. McLaren went back to work. He co-founded Zilo, an early user-generated college TV network, with David Isaacs. He helped launch CollegeHumor's TV ambitions. He produced Iron Ring, an MMA reality series with Floyd Mayweather, Ludacris, Nelly and T.I. attached. And then, in 2011, he found the audience nobody else was serving.

"I saw that there was a huge group of sports fans that didn't have anything to root for," he says. Hispanic fans, in the United States and across Latin America, loved combat sports and had no league built for them. Combate Global - originally Combate Americas - became, in his framing, "MMA with a Spanish flavor," a thoroughly authentic Hispanic product rather than an existing brand with subtitles bolted on.

The format is pure McLaren showmanship: COPA COMBATE, an eight-man, country-versus-country tournament settled in a single night. The numbers followed. The 2019 inaugural Univision broadcast pulled 610,000 viewers. A card in Hidalgo, Texas that June was the highest-rated MMA event of the night, beating both the UFC and Bellator. The second Copa Combate out-rated Bellator outright.

What he's doing now

In 2025 Combate Global moved its live events onto YouTube, the biggest streaming platform on Earth, betting that the future of Spanish-language sports is global and on-demand. "My audience is the future of MMA," McLaren says, "there's no doubt about that." He launched all-female Combate Female cards, leaning into a women's roster he genuinely believes outclasses the competition. After three decades, the contrarian instinct is intact: find the fight nobody is promoting, then promote it harder than anyone.

It is a strange resume for the godfather of cage fighting. He was born in 1956 in the Scottish village of Cowie, the son of a former RAF Flight Officer and a Presbyterian Church administrator, and emigrated to America at six. He took an AB at Berkeley and studied documentary film at MIT under the cinema-verite pioneer Richard Leacock. He started his career not in sports but in comedy, as talent director at Caroline's, and produced specials for Paul McCartney and Ellen DeGeneres. The man who made America watch men fight in a cage came up booking punchlines.

The throughline is not violence. It is taste for the thing the establishment won't touch yet. He saw a tournament where others saw a freak show, an audience where others saw a niche, a women's division where others saw an afterthought. He has been early, loudly, for thirty years - and he is still doing it from a cage in Miami, one fight night at a time.