If you ever want a reminder of just how electric live sport can be, go to a Professional Fighters League event.
In August 2025, I was back in Charlotte, North Carolina (home to our friends at NASCAR and the ACC), for one of the biggest nights in mixed martial arts: the PFL World Championship Finals. And while the fight card alone was exciting enough to justify flying halfway across the world, this trip was about something deeper.
It was about the people behind the production. The ones who turn a fight night into a global moment, who welcomed us in as if we were part of the team. While much of this story is about MMA, innovation, and fan engagement… it’s mostly about an exceptional team behind the scenes.
Immersing myself in the PFL world
Whenever I travel to film a client's story, I try to immerse myself in their world as much as possible, both as the organization and as a fan. My earlier trip to Paris with the LFP taught me how important that dual perspective is. Charlotte only reinforced it.
For the fan side, I went all in:
📱Downloaded the PFL app. 🥊Consumed fighter profiles. 👨🏻💻 Watched endless Shorts on YouTube. 🫣 Even practised my own hypothetical cage entrance at home (which, for the record, will never see the light of day).
But the other side, on the organizational level, is where the real learning happens.
❓Who captures what footage? ❓Where does each piece of content go? ❓How do they measure success? ❓How does a single night translate into hundreds of digital moments? ❓And how does the league keep fans engaged throughout the year?
You can only truly understand how everything unfolds by being there. By asking questions. By standing next to the people who make the magic happen.
The people behind the production
There’s something special about spending time with a team that is exceptionally good at what they do. And the PFL’s production and digital group is exactly that.
From the moment we arrived, the hospitality and openness were at a different level. Mike Chioditti, Chris Kaiser, Jesse Linhares, Michael Negron (and many others I didn’t get a chance to meet directly) each play a crucial role in turning a PFL event into a spectacle that feels bigger than any one moment or fighter.
This isn’t a small operation. It’s a coordinated orchestra involving broadcast, operations, storytelling, camera crews, social teams, editors, analysts, and tech partners all working in sync. But what stood out most wasn’t the scale, it was the precision. The calmness. The sense that even in the chaos of fight night, everyone knew exactly what they needed to do.
A league built for modern fans
The PFL set out to do things differently from other combat sports organisations. One of the things I instantly connected with was the familiarity of its structure. They’ve modelled their season, playoff, and championship formats on the tried-and-tested soccer format. Win your local league, you make it to the regional events, progress there and you get a shot on the biggest stage. This makes it instantly more familiar for fans of the world's most followed sport, so it's a great way to connect and build new PFL fans.
But what truly separates them is how they think about content.
On-site, we watched how their team captures every punch, kick, takedown, walkout, stare-down, and celebration, not just for broadcast, but for the thousands of digital decisions that follow. Clips for social, features for YouTube, highlights for partners, assets for fighters, micro-stories for fans in every region of the world.
And then there’s the ref cam. A fan favorite for obvious reasons, it puts you inside the cage in a way no traditional angle can. In Charlotte, we got the chance to interview Jason Herzog, one of the sport’s top referees. He explained that technology like this isn’t just cool, it’s educational, it brings fans closer, it builds understanding and it grows the sport. We’re excited that WSC Sports is able to ingest those additional feeds from inside the ring and distribute it wherever the PFL wants.
And that’s the common thread across everything the PFL team does: every piece of content is designed to meet fans where they are, whether that’s in the U.S., Spain, Africa, the Middle East, or elsewhere. They know their fan base, they know their platforms. They know speed matters and they know authenticity matters even more.
It’s easy to watch a final product online and assume it just comes together. It doesn’t. It comes from people. People who care, who prepare weeks in advance, people who move at seemingly impossible speed without sacrificing quality.
Seeing the PFL team in action didn’t just give me a better understanding of MMA production, it gave me a deeper appreciation of why this league has grown so fast and so globally.
Sitting down with Donn Davis
We also got the chance to sit down with PFL Founder and Chairman Donn Davis, who gave super interesting insights about how he got started and where he wants to take the PFL.
Donn talked about the challenge of building something new in a deeply established sport, the importance of great partners, and the wins the PFL has already achieved on its journey to becoming a global MMA powerhouse.
Experiencing the championship night
Nothing prepares you for the energy of a live MMA championship.
Walking through the arena, moving between broadcast trucks, backstage corridors, fighter warm-up areas, production rooms, and the cage itself… you feel the intensity everywhere. Fighters’ families pacing nervously, commentators rehearsing their storylines, officials going through final checks, fans building a wall of noise even before the first strike is thrown.
Everywhere you go, there’s emotion, hope, fear, adrenaline. And everywhere you look, there’s a story waiting to be told.
These are the moments the PFL team captures so well, the humanity behind the violence, the Rocky stories behind the fighters, the local heroes behind every crowd reaction.
Filming inside that environment gives you something you can’t script. Something real and raw, and that’s exactly what we hoped to bring to the short film we produced from the event.
And if you’d like to go deeper into the PFL’s growth strategy, their approach to content, or why they’ve become one of the most globally connected MMA leagues in the world, we’ve put together a full written case study you can read as well.
Huge thanks again to everyone at the PFL for the access, the collaboration, and the hospitality. Mike, Chris, Jesse, Michael, Donn — thank you for letting us into your world for a few days.
Can’t wait for the next trip!
