There appears to be a new confusing conversation surrounding the GFL at each turn. When the Global Fight League first started announcing a huge list of athletes that would be entering into their draft which took place last Friday, there were a lot of questions.
It quickly became apparent that all of those names wouldn’t actually be signed to the promotion, only the fighters that were picked up by one of the six teams but things haven’t been that simple. We now know the teams and which fighters were picked but there is still an on-going debate around the legitimacy of the draft following the news that some fighters didn’t agree to be taking part in it.
The most vocal of those names was Rashad Evans who claimed on social media that he didn’t consent to being in the GFL draft after already being picked as a member of the Los Angeles team. GFL founder Darren Owen looked to explain this during his recent appearance on The Ariel Helwani Show.
Owen said that out of the 120 fighters who were selected, only a “couple” of them hadn’t signed their contracts before the drafts took place which could be for multiple reasons. He specifically mentioned that in the case of Evans, they had already been told by his management that they had the all clear to put Evans in.
He stated that the GFL doesn’t want to sign fighters that don’t want to be there so every member of the roster had the option to part ways with the promotion after being drafted. With that in mind, Owen believes that this is just like any other draft where there are some final boxes to tick before the Global Fight League gets underway in April.
“We’ll see. Literally the day before the draft I’m like, ‘Ali, we’re good to put him in?’ And he’s like, ‘Yes brother, yes brother, we’re good to put him in.’ So we put him in and obviously Rashad came out afterwards and said like, ‘Hey I didn’t sign.’ I think if you look at the history of drafts, are any of those athletes signed before they get drafted to the team? No… There’s a lot of examples of thing that happen post-draft and this is just similar format to that.”
