Grandpa Fight League

Yesterday at 08:00 AM

The GFL is firing back at fans who can't stop pointing out how old a lot of the stars on their roster are.

2025 is going to be a big year for the upstart Global Fight League, which has been building up steam (and much needed capital) for their launch in the start of the new year.

At the end of January, the team-based combat sports promotion will run a draft where fighters will be assigned to six city-based squads. Then there'll be a 15 event 'season' between April and August followed by two 'playoff' events and a 'final' in November. The team event thing is more than a bit sus — those ancient souls who have circled this mortal coil for eons may remember the IFL's attempt at team MMA — but the fighters attached to the project are interesting.

And old.

Amongst the elderly athletes listed on GFL's website are Andrei Arlovski, Fabricio Werdum, Frank Mir, and Wanderlei Silva — two of whom recently submitted affidavits to the UFC antitrust lawsuit saying they suffered from 'symptoms common with TBI and CTE.' Werdum's brain damage was so severe that the PFL couldn't get him licensed after a bad beatdown at the hands of Renan Ferreira in 2021.

Those are the scary cases, the WTF cases, the 'Why has GFL even signed these guys?' cases. Perhaps the legends will end up being coaches or commentators, we don't know. There's a lot about GFL we don't know at this moment ... but we are learning that they're willing to dust it up on X (formerly Twitter) from time to time.

After announcing 41 year old former UFC contender Ovince Saint Preux had signed with Global Fight League, a fight fan tweeted "More like Geriatric Fighting League."

"Grandpa Fight League is funnier and more catchy if you ask us," the official Global Fight League account replied. "But also, please be respectful to fighters who have given so much to the fans."

To us, there's levels to this 'respect' game. There's your casual sports s—t talk disrespect, which has been part of the game since games were invented. And then there's the disrespect of putting aged veterans in cage matches with much younger opposition and building your brand off highlights of them getting massacred.

We're not saying this is what GFL is doing. GFL hasn't done anything yet. But we're watching closely, and we're hoping the organization is as fighter-forward and respectful as they'd presented themselves in the lead-up to their launch.