Jake Paul's new opponent wish list is a content drop with a hashtag attached. As of this writing, nothing on it is signed, dated, or sanctioned. It's a tweet. Treat it like one.
This started on Wednesday, October 7, when Sean Strickland began threatening to vacate his UFC middleweight title and walk out the door to chase a payday against Paul, fed up with what the UFC pays him. Paul answered the only way he knows how: he published a list of famous names and told the world to "make it happen." Conor McGregor is on it. Strickland is on it. Tom Aspinall is on it. So, on a separate boxing version, are Canelo Alvarez, Ryan Garcia and Anthony Joshua.
Look at that spread for a second. One name sits at one extreme of the sport, another at the opposite end. Putting both on the same "targets" list and pretending they're equally plausible opponents is a mood board. Nobody who actually intends to fight these people writes a document that spans eighty pounds of body weight and calls it a plan.
And then there's Joshua. Paul already shared a ring with him and came out on the wrong end of it. Naming the man who beat you as a future "target" shows exactly what kind of list this is: a lineup of faces fans will click on.
Paul reportedly made around $70 million last year. He dangled a million at Strickland, who figured he could do better. He's said McGregor pulls in thirty million a fight. Every number in this story is about money. The names sell tickets; the fights barely matter. Strickland has even said the UFC's reason for blocking a Paul bout was that Paul's audience is children who don't buy pay-per-views. Whatever you make of that, it captures what Paul actually sells.
Maybe none of this matters. Paul's goal was never to beat the best version of anybody. It's to take a huge name, often one past its peak or outside its natural weight, and turn the noise into revenue. By that measure he's one of the shrewdest operators the sport has produced, and winning or losing the actual rounds is beside the point. Fine. But stop calling it a fight plan. A fight plan has weights, timelines, and opponents who'd both show up on the same night. This has engagement metrics.
It also has a body count of vapor. His exhibition with Gervonta Davis fell apart. He's coming back from a broken jaw, eyeing a return around early 2027, and floating Francis Ngannou. The list grows, the fights don't. Paul keeps the wheel spinning because spinning it is the business.
None of this leads anywhere real. It's Jake Paul doing the one thing he's genuinely elite at: getting you to spend a week arguing about who he should fight, so that when he finally picks the softest name on the board, you've already sold the ticket for him.
