Jake Paul Wants the UFC to Release Jon Jones So the Francis Ngannou Fight Can Finally Happen

The biggest heavyweight fight in mixed martial arts has never needed a promoter. It has needed a permission slip. On Monday, Jake Paul decided to ask for one in public. Writing on X, Paul wondered aloud whether the UFC’s biggest star could simply walk the same path a boxing champion had walked hours earlier — ask out, get released, and go make the fight everybody actually wants to see.

Paul posted on X on Monday, in remarks reported by Athlon Sports: “Can Jon Jones request a release like Shakur Stevenson so we can go ahead and do this Francis Ngannou vs Jon Jones fight?” Paul continued in the same post: “They already said they are never working with Francis. So let Jon fly and we can give the fans what they want. Please and thank you.” It is a short post doing a great deal of work: part negotiation, part taunt, and part reminder that the most valuable heavyweight matchup in the sport is currently blocked not by money, not by timing, and not by either fighter’s willingness, but by a contract.

The Stevenson door that started the conversation

Paul’s timing was not accidental. Earlier on Monday, Shakur Stevenson’s release from Zuffa Boxing was announced, ending one of the strangest short chapters in recent boxing history. Stevenson said Zuffa approved his request over the weekend, after a run of frustration with fights that did not materialize. He had joined Zuffa in July with considerable fanfare and never competed for the promotion at all — a marquee signing that produced no walk to the ring, no purse bid, no fight. Stevenson now plans to run his own promotional company, taking control of his career in the most literal sense available to a modern fighter.

For Paul, the Stevenson precedent is the entire argument. A frustrated star asked to leave; the promotion agreed; the separation was quick and, publicly at least, clean. If that door exists in boxing’s newest major promotion, Paul is asking, why should it not exist for Jones in the UFC? It is a clever piece of framing, because it converts an abstract contractual question into a simple, fan-friendly one: the release has already happened once this week, for a fighter of real stature, without the sport collapsing. Why not twice?

Ngannou answers — carefully

The reply came from the other half of the proposed fight. Francis Ngannou, who knows more about fighting the UFC over a contract than anyone in the sport, answered Paul’s post with a single line. Ngannou wrote: “Freedom isn’t free; it’s not given, but it’s taken.”

Read it closely and it is a statement of philosophy, not of intent. Ngannou did not announce a fight, a negotiation, or even a plan. He described how freedom works, from the perspective of a man who obtained his the hard way. Ngannou left the UFC in 2023 after his own prolonged contract standoff, walking away as the reigning heavyweight champion rather than signing terms he did not accept. Whatever fans want to read into Monday’s exchange, MiddleEasy’s framing is the honest one: Ngannou’s reply states a position. It does not establish that he and Jones have agreed to fight, and it does not move a single signature any closer to a contract.

The superfight that got away

The reason a nine-word reply can set the sport buzzing is the size of the fight being discussed. Jones vs. Ngannou is the heavyweight superfight that never happened while both men were in the UFC — the champion who defined an era against the puncher who took the belt and then took his talents elsewhere. While both were under the same roof, the matchup was discussed constantly and made never. Then Ngannou’s 2023 exit split them across promotional lines, and the fight crossed over from “difficult” to “structurally blocked”: as Paul himself noted, the UFC has said it is never working with Ngannou again, which closes the ordinary route of simply booking the fight inside the Octagon.

That is precisely why Paul’s proposal runs in the opposite direction. Instead of bringing Ngannou back, it takes Jones out. A released Jones would be a free agent heavyweight of historic stature, and a fight with Ngannou outside the UFC would instantly become one of the biggest events combat sports could stage. Paul, whose entire career has been built on identifying the fight the public is already arguing about and inserting himself into the middle of it, understands that arithmetic as well as anyone alive.

What this is — and what it is not

So, what actually happened on Monday? A famous promoter-fighter floated a mechanism, and one of the two fighters involved endorsed the sentiment behind it. That is a real story — public pressure is how fights sometimes start — but it is several steps removed from a fight announcement, and the gaps matter. Stevenson’s separation was agreed: he asked, and Zuffa said yes. Nothing in that outcome proves Jones’s UFC contract contains matching release provisions, or that the UFC would view a request from its biggest heavyweight draw the way Zuffa viewed a boxer who had never fought for it. The two situations rhyme. They are not the same contract, the same leverage, or the same business.

There is also the matter of who has not spoken. Jones himself had not, in the reporting available Monday evening, publicly answered Paul’s post, and the UFC has given no indication that a release is on the table. Until one of those things changes, Monday’s exchange belongs in the category of fights being talked about rather than fights being made — a loud, well-timed push aimed at the one obstacle everyone in the sport can name.

Still, pushes like this are worth watching, because the landscape underneath them keeps shifting. A boxing champion just demonstrated that a modern star can ask out of a major promotion and receive an answer in a weekend. Ngannou demonstrated in 2023 that a champion can leave the UFC entirely and build a second act on his own terms. Jones vs. Ngannou remains the fight that got away — and on Monday, for the first time, somebody with a very large microphone proposed a specific way to go and get it. Keep up with the rest of the fight world on our sports front and the fighters index.