Once rival promotions, Resurrection Fighting Alliance (RFA) and Legacy Fighting Championship (Legacy FC) are now one.
Ed Soares, the president of RFA and a longtime MMA manager, announced Monday on The MMA Hour that the two promotions will be merging at the beginning of 2017 to form Legacy Fighting Alliance (LFA). An official press release followed.
Soares will head LFA as the new promotion’s CEO alongside RFA executive Sven Bean, who will act as the COO. Mick Maynard, the now-former president of Legacy FC, will not be part of LFA — he was recently hired as a matchmaker by the UFC.
LFA plans to have 30 events next year, all of which will air on AXS TV, just like RFA and Legacy FC.
Both RFA and Legacy FC have close ties to the UFC — together, they have sent over 100 fighters to the UFC. They are both considered two of the top feeder promotions for the UFC. Soares believes that, as one promotion, LFA will do big things in the mixed martial arts scene when the merger is completed next year.
“I felt that when we joined forced, we’d be much stronger together as a unit that we would be separately, and that’s what we wanted to do,” Soares said on The MMA Hour. “We wanted to create the NCAA of mixed martial arts. And by Legacy and RFA coming together, that’s exactly what we’ve built.”
The current RFA and Legacy FC champions will fight each other to determine the inaugural LFA titleholders when the merger is finalized.