Lords of the ring: meet the man in Jake Paul's corner

Nakisa Bidarian, one of the most enigmatic figures in combat sports, talks Alex Pattle through his journey to the top

- Alex Pattle

First things first: do not call Nakisa Bidarian “Jake Paul’s manager”, and do not call him a liar. These, according to the 47-year-old, are two of the biggest misconceptions around a man who has gone from a warring Iran to the UK, Los Angeles, Toronto, Dubai, Wall Street, the UFC, and Most Valuable Promotions, the boxing company he founded with YouTube star Paul - his business partner, not employee.

Bidarian, clearly, lived many lives before his current one. Child refugee, investment banker, financial adviser. Now he is a promoter and one of the closest associates to boxing’s most notorious disruptor. Bidarian is the man behind the 28-year-old “Problem Child”.

But once, he was a boy born in Iran and raised around the world. “My family fled the country because of the Iraq war,” he tells The Independent. “My older brother had the potential of being drafted into the military at age 12; they were sending kids to walk over landmines.”

At that time, Bidarian’s mother prioritised morals over money. “She didn’t take any money from my father, because he wasn’t a good man. And because she was 18 and supposed to go to college, my grandad didn’t agree with the marriage. He said: ‘If this doesn’t work out, don’t come to me.’ Thirteen years later, she didn’t. She got a job at a shoe store and a doughnut shop.”

She kept customers on their feet and got her family back on its own. In this period, they moved to the UK, US, and Canada, with Bidarian working in management consulting before heading to Wall Street as a graduate. However, he found he did not enjoy life in New York City. “I like money,” he says, “but I’m not a hustler. It felt like everyone there was hustling.”

Some around Bidarian scoffed at his decision to move back to Dubai, where he briefly lived as a teenager, but a job at Morgan Stanley led him to the Fertitta brothers - Frank and Lorenzo, then owners of the UFC.