PFL Announces 2025 World Tournament, Eight Weight Classes Featured

PFL
2023 PFL 8: New York Ceremonial Weigh Ins at the The Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023. (Cooper Neill / PFL)

The PFL’s $1 million dollar tournaments are a thing of the past, but a modified version of their tournament format lives on.

On Wednesday, league officials announced their 2025 World Tournament, featuring a grand prix format and eight weight classes. That’s actually two more than the PFL has previously featured, though the prize money to the winner has dropped – on top of show/win money throughout the season, each tournament champion will earn $500,000 U.S.

Some of the changes were previously reported by journalist Al Zullino.

Instead of the “season” format and points system previously employed by the PFL, the 2025 World Tournament will be a grand prix style, win and move forward setup. The tournament will run April through August, a much more compact schedule than previous years. Semi-finals take place in June.

New to the PFL tournament format is the middleweight division, which was previously omitted when the league’s season featured just six weight classes. Also featured for the first time is the bantamweight division.

Women’s flyweight remains the only women’s division featured. In previous years, both women’s lightweight (the Kayla Harrison era) and featherweight were included. Flyweight replaced featherweight in the tournament format last year.

Notably, the PFL has both Larissa Pacheco and Cris Cyborg under contract, two of the biggest women’s 145lb stars on the planet.

No athletes have been announced for the PFL 2025 World Tournament, though 64 are expected to take part, with a total of $20 million in purses/prize money on the table. The first of 10 events kicks off on April 3, 2025; three championship cards close the show on August 1, 15, and 21.