SEEMS crazy to be writing this, but 24-year-old YouTuber Jake Paul is shaping up to be the voice of reason that boxing and mixed martial arts (MMA) so sorely need and have done from the get-go.

The revelation that he donated some of his purse to the fighters who appeared on the undercard of his latest “fight” against former MMA welterweight champion, 40-year-old Tyron Woodley, stating that he wanted them to have their best-ever payday, you may well dismiss as a PR stunt.

What can’t be dismissed, however, is his call for a fighters’ union.

“I’ve thought about creating a fighter union,” he stated in a recent interview, “and there have been talks about it.”

“I would love to do it,” he continued. “It’s the only way that this fighter pay [issue] and these contracts that people are locked into — it’s the only way that it’s going to change.”

Paul has reserved especial ire for UFC head honcho Dana White over the near dictatorial control the latter wields over the organisation, the fighters he has under contract, and the sport of MMA overall. 

In a recent statement posted on social media, Paul vented that White had “bullied [his] way to controlling thousands of fighters’ careers.” 

“You live in lies and every major fighter on your roster has complained about pay,” he said. “Pay your fighters more!”

Combat sports, specifically boxing and MMA, have never been more popular — hence these ridiculous boxing match-ups between young YouTubers like Jake Paul, his brother Logan, and forty-something retired fighters and MMA champions such as Floyd Mayweather and Woodley.

As such, the money both sports are generating is phenomenal. The problem, as in near every industry in these dog days of late capitalism, is its horrifically uneven and unfair distribution.

The guys at the very apex of the sport — the likes of Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, Canelo Alvarez, Conor McGregor and so on — command humungous prize money and commercial deals. Good for them.

However the guys at the bottom, appearing on their undercards, are not paid anything like the kind of money commensurate with the risk they take every time they step into the ring or octagon.

And without the undercard, regardless of who’s headlining, a boxing show or MMA event doesn’t exist.

The idea of a union for fighters is not a new one. Here in Britain, Barry McGuigan has for decades tried to set one up — initially with the Professional Boxers Association in 1983, then years down the line with the establishment of the British Boxers Association (BBA). 

In 2014 the BBA even won the backing of the GMB union, but it seems to have fallen away in the years since.

This is perhaps no surprise in a sport in which most of its participants are completely dependent on remaining on good terms with promoters who exercise a stranglehold, else they don’t fight or eat.

It can’t be said enough: the business model of professional boxing is antiquated and near structureless, lacking an overarching international governing body.

Everything operates according to the whims and fancies of its main promoters, and in such a scenario the bargaining power of the fighters is nugatory unless and until they become a fan favourite and major star, which in the vast majority of cases isn’t going to happen.

When it comes to MMA and Dana White, the situation is even worse. This guy controls the entire sport with no rival promoters or promoters to offer MMA fighters a choice, and what he says goes.

Earlier this year former UFC middleweight champion Luke Rockhold went public with damning criticism of how White does business. “Fighting is like a mafia,” he stated during a podcast interview in the US. “[UFC] have these very mafioso-type tactics in negotiations. They try to fuck with you.”

It comes to something when it takes a 24-year-old YouTube star making a brief foray into boxing to not only see the rot that bedevils both boxing and MMA, but to have the audacity to declare it in public and call for the one thing with the potential to clean up both — a union for fighters.

Jake Paul may not speak with authority as a bona fide fighter, but he does speak from a position of strength, being a young man with a huge social media following and, with it, a platform.

Add to the mix a bank balance that ensures he doesn’t need to curry favour with anyone, he could well prove the most unlikely saviour imaginable for men, and increasingly women, who risk all for relative peanuts.

If he does go ahead and attempt to establish a union for fighters, it’ll be a mammoth task. The dominant cultural values underpinning combat sports are positively Nietzschean, specifically the primacy-of-will ethos commonly associated with individual strength and struggle. What’s required is a reimagining of this ethos of strength and struggle as collectivist idea.

“You never lose until you actually give up,” Mike Tyson once declared. Let’s hope Jake Paul and all who support the idea of unionising MMA and boxing bear this in mind.