RAF Takes Dvalishvili vs Cejudo and Snyder vs Sadulaev to Tbilisi — First International Event Remakes UFC 298 in a Country That Worships Wrestling

RAF is taking its first international card to Tbilisi, and if you've trained anywhere in the Caucasus region, you already know why that's not a random choice. The Resurrection Athletic Federation — the wrestling promotion that spent the last two years quietly rebuilding after Ryan Bader stepped back — is making a calculated move. They're bringing Merab Dvalishvili vs Henry Cejudo and Kyle Snyder vs Abdulrakhim Sadulaev to a country where wrestling isn't a sport. It's a religion.

Tbilisi doesn't need UFC to understand grappling. Georgia's freestyle wrestling tradition runs so deep that Tbilisi State University's wrestling program has been producing international medalists for decades. The Caucasus region produces wrestlers the way Minnesota produces hockey players — it's just what you do. So when RAF shows up with a card headlined by two Olympic wrestlers squaring off against two of the best combat athletes in the world, they're not trying to sell wrestling to Georgia. They're coming home to do it.

This is RAF's counter-move in a sport where the traditional power structure has always flowed one direction: MMA promotions dabble in grappling, grappling promotions get absorbed by MMA companies. But RAF's strategy reverses that logic. Instead of chasing American suburban sprawl with traditional fighting cards, they're taking elite grappling to grappling strongholds. Tbilisi is step one.

The Dvalishvili vs Cejudo matchup is the headline that sells international interest. Merab is the Georgian fighter who climbed through MMA and built a legitimate championship contention in the UFC. Cejudo is the Olympic gold medalist turned UFC legend who has done the crossover so many times he's basically a professional crossover at this point. Put them on a card in Georgia? That's not just marketing. That's narrative. Merab comes home. Cejudo comes to the country that produced him via its wrestling heritage.

But the real grappling content is Snyder vs Sadulaev. This is where RAF's business model starts to look less like ESPN programming and more like what the actual grappling world cares about. Kyle Snyder is a two-time Olympic gold medalist (2016, 2020) who sits atop the freestyle wrestling world. Abdulrakhim Sadulaev is a three-time world champion and one of the most dominant 97kg/97+ wrestlers alive. They've competed before. This is a match where technique matters more than gate, where the wrestling community shows up regardless of production value, where every scramble and shot is an argument about how wrestling actually works.

This is also where RAF's model becomes dangerous — for traditional MMA promotions, anyway. Because here's what they understand that UFC keeps forgetting: wrestling countries don't need MMA to care about grappling. Kazakhstan doesn't need a UFC card to fill an arena for Sadulaev. Japan filled buildings for NJPW wrestling when American wrestling was a punchline. Georgia will show up for Snyder and Sadulaev because they speak the language. Freestyle wrestling is the default, and wrestlers are the celebrities.

The UFC 298 comparison in the original announcement is interesting precisely because it's a business language translation. UFC 298 (November 2024) was billed as a grappling showcase — Islam Makhachev vs Ilia Topuria for the lightweight belt, featuring one of the most dominant grapplers in the sport. It worked because grappling had become a legitimate selling point in MMA. But UFC 298 happened in New York, sold to the crossover audience, packaged for American primetime. RAF is doing the inverse: taking the same format (elite grappler vs grappler, elite wrestler vs wrestler) and selling it to the home crowd where wrestling isn't a crossover sport — it's the main event.

The Georgia angle also matters because it's a signal about RAF's international strategy. They're not trying to replicate UFC's model (domestic, American-audience-first, wrestling as one element of MMA). They're fragmenting the market. Take wrestling-heavy matchups to wrestling-heavy countries. Let the American MMA diaspora compete for prestige internationally while the UFC controls domestic domestic American primetime. It's not new (OneFC did this with Southeast Asia), but it's new for a US-based wrestling promotion.

What the grappling community is actually talking about: Sadulaev's ability to compete at the highest level internationally when the rules favor his style (folkstyle/freestyle rather than no-gi submission). Snyder's dominance in a pure wrestling context where he doesn't have to manage MMA scoring. Dvalishvili's homecoming narrative — he's built a legitimate path in UFC middleweight, but he'll always be first a Georgian wrestler. And Cejudo... Cejudo is just Cejudo. He shows up, competes, and talks about it on social media. No surprises.

The practical side: RAF is operating on lower overhead than traditional MMA. No athletic commission licensing overhead in Georgia (or at least not the same bureaucratic drag as Nevada/New York/California). No need to sell PPV to American cable distributors. No obligation to hit primetime American television. They book the talent, they sell to the regional audience that already understands the sport, they build a card. It's the same economics that make ONE Championship viable in Southeast Asia and PFL viable in franchise markets.

There's also the question of what happens when elite wrestlers realize they can compete at the highest level for prestige and purse without the traditional MMA gatekeeping. Sadulaev doesn't need to prove himself in the UFC. He's already the consensus best 97kg freestyle wrestler in the world. If RAF pays him to prove it against Snyder (another consensus elite), on his home continent, to a crowd that already recognizes his legitimacy — that's a rational business decision for both athlete and promotion. UFC can't match that logic because they're built on American television metrics and PPV buys. RAF just needs to move tickets and streaming in countries where wrestling matters.

What's missing from this narrative is any sense that traditional MMA promotions see this as a threat. They don't — yet. One card in Tbilisi doesn't remake the sport. But if RAF succeeds with the Tbilisi model, repeats it in Kazakhstan (Sadulaev's home region), maybe tries it in Japan (wrestling is mainstream there), suddenly you have an alternative ecosystem where wrestlers can compete at the highest level without joining the MMA economy. That's not a threat to UFC's business today. It's a threat to UFC's monopoly on where elite grapplers' careers go.

The punchline: Merab will dominate Cejudo because Merab is the superior wrestler at the moment and this is a grappling-heavy ruleset. Snyder will have the more technically interesting match because Sadulaev is close to his level and both are operating in their native element (freestyle rules, wrestling first, no MMA scoring). And everyone in Tbilisi already knows what the outcome will be. They'll show up anyway because that's what wrestling people do — they watch the sport because they understand it, not because they don't know the outcome.

RAF is betting that's enough. And in a country where wrestling is the default, they're probably right.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• RAF (Resurrection Athletic Federation) — Wrestling Promotion
• Merab Dvalishvili — UFC Fighter Profile
• Henry Cejudo — Combat Sports Career Overview
• Kyle Snyder — Olympic Wrestler
• Abdulrakhim Sadulaev — Freestyle Wrestling World Champion
• Georgia Wrestling Tradition — Tbilisi State University