The ONE Championship files, Part 1: Employees expose 'hyped talent,' control and retaliation

Shedding some sunlight on ONE Championship

Shedding some sunlight on ONE Championship

If you're familiar with any of my past work, you've likely seen something other than event analysis, interviews, and the usual shitpost. Part of my work at the site I used to work at involved an in-depth look at the very secretive ONE Championship. I'd love to show you at the original source, but that's sadly not possible for the moment.

I'll have someone else explain precisely why for you here instead. Lucky for all of us, I managed to save those exposées on ONE Championship for us to revisit here.

Founded in 2011, the promise of the organization was to unite champions and talents from all over Asia to compete and put on phenomenal shows. Currently, their product is available for viewing on Amazon Prime, and has consistently had high quality of action in recent years. Yet the happenings behind the scenes have been more than concerning.

During the course of my work scouring for information, a lot fell by the wayside. Some of it simply couldn't be used for one reason or another, whether it required more evidence for publication, or was just part of the cutting room floor.

In each and every single one of these cases though, not a single source was willing to go on record due to fear of retaliation, which the promotion has unfortunately been known for. ONE Championship also has gag orders in their incredibly restrictive and controversial contracts.

Yet a lot of it was consistent and provided a lot of perspective of how the company was run. It explained so much of the things that the audience at home or the online fan may have suspected. And the picture it paints isn't pretty.

So I'm doing something a little different. These are testimonies from individuals I've spoken to, one person at a time. These are their stories of their times and dealings with ONE Championship and Evolve MMA in Singapore.

We'll start off with our first source, a man we'll call "Tom." Tom's time in ONE Championship was peculiar compared to that of others I've spoken to as his personal dealings with head boss Chatri Sityodtong, birth name Chatri Trisiripisal, were rather cordial. There was no friction between them, but the way things were run led to tons of problems. Having done work with ONE’s marketing crew, he got a unique perspective on how operations behind the scenes worked.