ONE Championship has cut three senior figures from its leadership team: VP Rich Franklin, SVP of Competition Matt Hume, and COO John Scheler, according to insider reports. The departures mark the most significant shake-up at the top of the promotion, following a string of financial issues, event cancellations, and organizational changes across the company.
Rich Franklin, Matt Hume, and John Scheler Cut at ONE Championship
Rich Franklin joined ONE Championship as Vice President in May 2014, moving into the executive suite after a decorated MMA career that included a UFC middleweight title reign and wins over Chuck Liddell, Wanderlei Silva, and Yushin Okami. Before coming aboard, he consulted Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta at the UFC, who both voiced their support for the move.
Over the following decade, Franklin served as the public face of ONE’s U.S. expansion efforts, working with sports commissions to get ONE’s unique ruleset, which allows knees to the head of a grounded opponent, approved in multiple American states. He also ran ONE Warrior Series, a talent discovery program that launched fighters such as Stamp Fairtex, Lito Adiwang and Mark Abelardo onto ONE’s main roster. As recently as early 2025, Franklin was speaking publicly about planned U.S. events for the year and working to grow the promotion’s American footprint.
Matt Hume came to ONE at its founding, serving first as the promotion’s Chief Official and head referee before moving into an executive role in 2012 as Vice President of Operations and Competition. His responsibilities included matchmaking, talent recruitment, and overseeing ONE’s rules and regulations.
Hume also had a prior connection to Rich Franklin that predated ONE, Franklin had trained under “The Wizard” during his fighting career. Hume’s time at the company was not without controversy: in 2025, manager Ali Abdelaziz publicly accused him of harming fighters’ careers, while former champion Arjan Bhullar posted a pointed social media rebuke of his practices before the posts were deleted. Hume’s tenure at ONE stretched over 13 years, making him one of the promotion’s longest-serving executives.
John Scheler joined ONE in July 2020 as Senior Vice President of Events and Production Development, then was promoted to Chief Operating Officer in March 2022. Before ONE, he held senior strategy and operations positions at the XFL and WWE, and prior to his sports career served as a Marine Corps captain.
ONE Championship has been navigating a sustained financial struggle, reporting a record consolidated loss of $90 million in 2023 and cumulative deficits exceeding $530 million since the promotion’s founding in 2011. The promotion’s most recent available financials, for FY2024, according to Kristie Neo, showed some progress on the surface but revealed that roughly 93% of broadcast revenue was non-cash, putting actual cash revenue for the year at an estimated $19.5 million, barely enough to cover operational outflows. ONE held just $16 million in cash at the end of 2024.
The company had already conducted layoffs before this latest round. In October 2024, ONE cut “a few dozen” employees across multiple departments, including at its Singapore headquarters, as part of a stated strategy to reach profitability. Those cuts affected staff in broadcast, e-sports, finance, marketing, and public relations. ONE Esports, the company’s gaming unit, separately retrenched over half its staff in early 2025.
On the events side, the promotion scrapped its planned return to Denver’s Ball Arena, an August 2026 date that had already been pushed back once, and quietly removed it from the website alongside the closure of the women’s strawweight MMA division and the release of champion Xiong Jingnan. ONE had only held two U.S. events total, both in Colorado, since the promotion’s American debut in 2023. Amazon Prime Video, the platform that had broadcast ONE’s Fight Night series to U.S. audiences, reportedly did not renew its broadcast deal past 2025.
The latest departures show a pattern at ONE that stretches back several years. In early 2024, reports circulated that the company had quietly lost three senior C-suite figures inside a three-month window, with no indication it planned to refill those seats. The promotion also shifted its global production hub from Singapore to Bangkok in mid-2025 as part of a push to centralize content operations and reduce costs. Fighter relations have also been strained, with prominent former champions publicly calling on the promotion to release them from contracts and one fighter filing legal notice citing breach of contract.
Franklin, for his part, expressed genuine enthusiasm for the company’s U.S. ambitions right through early 2025, calling the work he had done in getting American commissions to approve the promotion’s ruleset a source of personal pride. Neither he, Hume, nor Scheler has commented publicly on their exits as of this writing.
