It’s hard to believe Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano will fight each other in the year 2026. And yet, here we are.
Rousey vs. Carano became official this week when, on Tuesday, Most Valuable Promotions announced the highly anticipated fight will headline a May 16 event that will stream live on Netflix from Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif. News of the featherweight booking came as a shock, considering it’s been forever since the two legends of women’s MMA last competed in a cage.
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Rousey, 39, will fight for the first time – her WWE tenure notwithstanding – since she was finished in 48 seconds by Amanda Nunes in a bantamweight title fight Dec. 30, 2016 at UFC 207. For Carano, who turns 44 in April, you have to go back even further to Aug. 15, 2009, when she and Cris Cyborg made history as the first women to headline a major MMA event under the Strikeforce banner, which aired live on Showtime. Carano lost by first-round TKO.
Both Rousey and Carano are considered pioneers of women’s MMA but for different reasons. In her heyday, Carano was the world’s most famous female combat sports athlete and became the first female MMA fighter to break through into the mainstream, evidenced by her post-MMA success as a Hollywood actress. If not for Carano paving the way, Rousey might never have become the first woman to compete in the UFC when she headlined UFC 157 against Liz Carmouche in February 2023, marking the beginning of a three-year run as the sport’s biggest star.
Could Rousey vs. Carano have happened in Strikeforce?
A superfight between Rousey and Carano would’ve been ideal more than a decade ago. So why is it only happening all these years later? For starters, timing.
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Rousey and Carano’s fighting careers didn’t overlap. While they both competed for Scott Coker in Strikeforce, Carano’s final appearance was her historic 2009 matchup with Cyborg, which capped off an eight-fight career that spanned a little more than three years.
Rousey, who competed in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics in judo, didn’t make her professional MMA debut until March 2011, signing with Strikeforce later that year.
Rousey vs. Carano: The UFC superfight that could’ve been
Despite the timing being off, there still was an opportunity to make a Rousey vs. Carano superfight happen.
By the time Rousey burst onto the UFC scene in 2013, Carano had just started parlaying her popularity into a successful acting career, starring in “Haywire” (2011) and “Fast & Furious 6” (2013), with more projects in the works. Then in 2014, the UFC came calling. In a November 2019 interview with Ariel Helwani, Carano opened up about a meeting she had with Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta, who she said offered her $1 million to fight Rousey. Her only request was that she be given six months to figure out her training camp situation since she hadn’t fought in five years and that news of their meeting stay quiet in the meantime.
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According to Carano, she had “a nice dinner” with the UFC executives, “and we all left positive.” But things took an unexpected turn for Carano when White didn’t honor her request.
“Then like the next day, Dana was out there talking about me, talking about my name, and telling people that he was going to sign me – and I don’t even have a team yet,” Carano said. “I was like, ‘That’s not what we discussed; you were supposed to give me at least six months to kind of find a team.’ Then he started trying to put on the pressure through the media, and it was a bummer, because I told him over text message that’s not what we talked about. I need time. Now I’m going to walk into a gym, and people are going to know that’s what I’m doing. I need to build trust if I’m going to find people.
“So then he kept on doing that, and I was still kind of searching for a team and feeling all that pressure, and then he sent me a text message saying, ‘This (expletive) is something, like (expletive) us around,’ something like that. And I sent a text message back and I sent, ‘I think you sent this out to the wrong person.’ And he said, ‘I don’t think I did.'”
That killed any hope of Rousey vs. Carano happening during their prime years.
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Rousey vs. Carano: Better late than never?
The fact that Rousey and Carano will fight this year has been met with mixed feelings, with MMA notables calling it “the shot of adrenaline MMA has been lacking,” “surreal,” “so random,” and more.
What can we expect when Rousey and Carano finally step into the cage May 16? It’s anyone’s guess.
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Why didn’t Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano fight sooner?
