Boxing may have its fight of the year already sewed up for 2026. And it’s not something that took place in the ring, it happened on social media between Luke Thomas and Mike Coppinger.
Thomas has been a fixture in the combat sports media scene for 20 years from Bloody Elbow to CBS Sports to his Morning Kombat podcast. Coppinger has covered combat sports for years with stints at Fox Sports and ESPN. In 2025, he moved to The Ring Magazine and DAZN.
In 2024, The Ring magazine became another instrument of the Saudi sportswashing campaign. It was purchased by Turki Alalshikh, the Chairman of the General Entertainment Authority of Saudi Arabia. Alalshikh is also the co-founder of Zuffa Boxing along with Dana White under the TKO umbrella.
The boxing world is known for complicated webs of entanglement and things not exactly being on the up-and-up in the sport throughout the generations. But the conflicts of interest in one of the sport’s major promoters also controlling one of its most widely-read outlets hits you in the face like a Joe Frazier left hook.
For instance, there is the story from just a couple weeks ago of veteran boxing promoter Frank Warren threatening a $1 billion lawsuit against Zuffa and a Saudi entertainment company for breach of contract. The Ring then put an unsourced message out on social media that Warren’s company was in financial trouble and taking digs at his Queensberry Promotions. As Thomas pointed out, it amounted to sheer propaganda from Turki Alalshikh through his own publication.
Here’s Turki responding to Frank Warren pushed through The Ring 👇 https://t.co/QnrC1tcQ8u
— Luke Thomas🏋️♀️ (@lthomasnews) February 25, 2026
On Thursday, Thomas took another shot at The Ring in a post quoting its owner taunting another rival promoter in Eddie Hearn. That led to Mike Coppinger jumping in to defend his current employer in calling out Thomas. Coppinger said nobody takes him seriously and he was cosplaying as “the authority on ethics.”
And who takes you seriously? All you seem to do is sit on a high horse of moral superiority. Easy enough, I suppose, to cosplay as the authority on ethics when it’s what you’re best known for
— Mike Coppinger (@MikeCoppinger) March 5, 2026
Well, that tweet was enough to elicit a video response from Luke Thomas and it may be the most fiery sports media rant since Stephen A. Smith unloaded a 40 minute takedown of Jason Whitlock on his podcast.
As Thomas addressed Coppinger, he said, “B*tch, I’m about to dunk on you in ways that your f—ing grandchildren are gonna feel.”
He wasn’t lying.
— Luke Thomas🏋️♀️ (@lthomasnews) March 5, 2026
“Mike, look at me brother. Do you think you have these jobs because you are good at them? Is that what you think… Do you think you sit on that panel because you are good at this? Do you think that you get scoops because you do intrepid reporting in an honest way? Which, by the way, half of the things you report are wrong and they have to get corrected by other folks in the industry, not limited to Dan Rafeal but many others. Do you think you have these jobs because you earned them? You got these jobs because you’re the biggest c—sucker of power in combat sports,” Thomas said.
“You’re everything that’s wrong with the profession. You’re the avatar of the failure of sports journalism. You, brother, you take marching orders and do the bidding of a guy who works for MBS. You work for a theocratic f—ing monarchy. Who the f— do you think you are, brother? You think you get these jobs because you’re good at them? You get these jobs because you swallow the balls of people in power. You are useful to powerful people because you are a f—ing idiot stooge. That is why. You are the walking embodiment of the rot within this industry.”
And he wasn’t done. Some of the other haymakers that Luke Thomas threw the way of Mike Coppinger in the seven-minute rant included the following:
“If he’s [Max Kellerman] Howard Stern, you’re Beetlejuice. You’re the sideshow they let on there because they need somebody who has no beliefs in anything other than you gotta suck the d*ck and balls of power as vociferously as possible to get ahead.”
“Shut your f—ing mouth. You are an untalented zero. You can’t write for s—, you’re a mush-mouthed nothing, and by the way I know about some of your Showtime tryouts that you f—ed up royally. You’re bad at this. You’re bad at all of it. You’re good at one thing. One. You are a motherf—ing cowardly b*tch @$$ d*cksucking stooge to the worst f—ing malevolent actors in all of sports.”
“You don’t have a career on talent, you don’t have a career on merit. You have a career on prostitution. That’s what you are. You’re a whore.”
“You wouldn’t know what it meant to act ethically if your life depended on it.”
Whether it’s the founding of LIV Golf, or even social media ads from Fabrizio Romano, the Saudi sportswashing effort has extended far and wide across all of sports. The pinnacle of these efforts will be the hosting of the 2034 FIFA World Cup. But through their relationships with TKO as the host of WrestleMania and the launch of Zuffa Boxing, they have arguably been the most successful in the combat sports world.
And in truth, anyone who works for The Ring or partners with the Saudi effort has to acknowledge and wear that no matter if it’s Arlo White calling LIV Golf or Max Kellerman working with Zuffa. Maybe nobody has addressed it in the sports world in quite the direct and aggressive way that Luke Thomas did. And the shocking nature of the personal shots at Mike Coppinger in such a vicious takedown make it seem like there’s some bad blood that runs pretty deep there.
But the reality that cannot be denied is that these sports journalists are all working for the same regime that sponsored the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi and are engaged in propaganda work for them. And it’s a choice they are all going to have to live with.