Charlotte — Yet another decent PFL event arrived on Friday, with PFL Charlotte once again drawing criticism not for its fights, but for the difficulty fans had finding them.
With the main card expected to air on ESPN following prelims on the ESPN App, things quickly went sideways as the Savannah Bananas game went over its allotted time. ESPN, however, killed the ESPN App stream, airing the movie Dodgeball, while the PFL main card apparently went to ESPN 2, not that viewers were aware, until it finally switched back to the main ESPN channel.
It’s a situation that PFL CEO John Martin has been frequently frustrated by in recent months.
“That’s live TV,” Martin admitted, speaking with media outlets including Cageside Press following the event. “We work collaboratively with ESPN. When you’re in the live TV business and you have prior programming that runs over, that’s a little bit unfortunately the nature of live TV. But bouncing us around in between all of the networks though is just maddening, quite honestly.”
“Again tonight I was getting texts from friends of mine like ‘the app ended, it doesn’t tell you where to go.’ They didn’t know to go to EPSN2 where we started, we had to rearrange some of our fights just to try to accommodate just so we could start the main card on the primary ESPN.”
It doesn’t help that the PFL Charlotte card had such a strong build, with early fights exceeding expectations, only for the main card to get off to a rocky start.
“Issues and problems continue, but we can’t use that as an excuse. My own opinion of the card tonight was, the star of tonight was the undercard. There were some amazing fights on the undercard, and the main card was a little more uneven.”
With the PFL’s merger into Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions underway, however, Martin does see a silver lining.
“I still love being on EPSN, they are the juggernaut in sports, and I think with our announcement with MVP, maybe we have an opportunity to talk with them and try to reset a little bit- what they may want, what we may want. I’m hopeful for that. So we’ll see.”
Martin was also pleased with the turnout at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina on Friday.
“We may have set a gate record for PFL, which obviously we’re MVP now, but for PFL events, we had a really, really strong gate,” he stated. Martin was also impressed with the crowd engagement in Charlotte, and admitted that while he knew it was a great sports town, “I didn’t know it was a really, really great MMA town. So that was a pleasant surprise for me.”
Watch the full PFL Charlotte post-fight press conference with John Martin above.
