It was one of the most viral stories of the Premier League season – Brighton hired an MMA fighter to help them with the intensity of set-piece duels. Flashscore had the chance to talk to that fighter, OKTAGON’s Christian Eckerlin, about that opportunity and the similarities between MMA and football, both sports he’s participated in at a high level.
Christian Eckerlin wears many hats. He’s a nightclub owner in Germany, a successful YouTuber, and first and foremost one of the most recognisable names of European MMA. But before all of that, he was an aspiring football player, too. ‘The King of Frankfurt’, as he’s known, played in the Junior Bundesliga as a youth player and made it as high as the third division as a professional. At the time, he was already combining football practices and combat sports training. And in the end, when he had to choose one way, he chose that of the fighter.
“A couple of things happened in the background then, with a change of coaching staff besides some other stuff… But the final decision was made after my first fight. I knew that I had to follow that path as I had never felt as much alive as in that moment. The rest is history,” Eckerlin tells Flashscore in an exclusive interview. Despite finding success in MMA, he still returns to football stadiums…
In 2024, he was the main event when OKTAGON sold out the Deutsche Bank Park, the home of Eintracht Frankfurt, in Eckerlin’s hometown, to set the record for the highest attendance ever for an MMA company.
In October, the company returns there to match their unique feat – and of course, the hometown hero Eckerlin will be there too.
Before that, he took a surprising ‘side job’ in the Premier League with Brighton.
“Fabian Hurzeler wanted to improve his team in that regard (set pieces). He felt it was a good idea to bring me in, so I was contacted by his coaching staff,” Eckerlin reveals. The German fighter believes his training was a welcome addition to the team.
“I did appreciate the modern facilities and the general attitude of the whole team – every player came out with an open mind and to learn. They made the workout very easy, and I’m sure they also had a good time. I feel they were very open to it. Fighting is something natural, and everyone is sort of attracted to it – football players are no different in that regard,” he recalls.
Eckerlin is a believer in cross-training and in the fact that many athletes can learn from a bit of MMA training.
“Any sport relies on hip positioning, but it’s our bread and butter in MMA and wrestling. I felt that implementing a couple of basic wrestling techniques could help them get a better composure and balance,” he explains about what he taught Brighton’s players.
Ever since his session with Brighton went viral on social media, Eckerlin hasn’t yet been contacted by any other club, but believes the Brighton appearance wasn’t the last time he worked with football players.
Ask Elviana Zelthorne how they got into boxing news and updates and you'll probably get a longer answer than you expected. The short version: Elviana started doing it, got genuinely hooked, and at some point realized they had accumulated enough hard-won knowledge that it would be a waste not to share it. So they started writing.
What makes Elviana worth reading is that they skips the obvious stuff. Nobody needs another surface-level take on Boxing News and Updates, Expert Commentary, Fighter Profiles and Statistics. What readers actually want is the nuance — the part that only becomes clear after you've made a few mistakes and figured out why. That's the territory Elviana operates in. The writing is direct, occasionally blunt, and always built around what's actually true rather than what sounds good in an article. They has little patience for filler, which means they's pieces tend to be denser with real information than the average post on the same subject.
Elviana doesn't write to impress anyone. They writes because they has things to say that they genuinely thinks people should hear. That motivation — basic as it sounds — produces something noticeably different from content written for clicks or word count. Readers pick up on it. The comments on Elviana's work tend to reflect that.
