GLORY is the premiere stand-up combat sports league, with engaging live events and easily accessible content, where elite fighters compete and sports fans connect with their heroes and the sport they love.
The League:
The world's premier kickboxing league, GLORY World Series maintains seven different weight classes. Fights take place both as single matches between two fighters (known as 'superfights') and as part of tournaments.
Four-man tournaments are the standard, with eight-man tournaments also staged on occasion.
The tournaments take one of two forms: either they are World Championship Tournaments, with the division's world title on the line, or they are 'Contender' tournaments, with the winner earning a spot in the next upcoming World Championship Tournaments.
Fighters are ranked according to a thorough point-system maintained by the GLORY World Federation that awards points to fighters based on their performances in tournaments and in single bouts.
Ranking points allow fighters to climb their division and get into the positions which will gain them title shots and entry to the Contender and/or World Championship Tournaments. Points are gained primarily via participation in single fights which form part the GLORY Superfight Series cards.
GLORY World Series rules permit the use of punches, kicks and knee strikes. Clinching is extremely limited - no more than five seconds, and the clinch must be active - and there are no takedowns and no fighting on the floor.
Live events take place globally and in some of the world's most prominent cities. London, Los Angeles, New York, Istanbul, Tokyo and Rome are among cities which have hosted GLORY World Series events.
In 2011, multi-award winning hedge fund investor and martial arts enthusiast Pierre Andurand along with well-known media investor and asset manager Scott Rudmann and Marcus Luer, CEO of sports marketing agency Total Sports Asia (TSA), became the catalysts for the formation of Glory Sports International after banding together with the goal of bringing the sport of kickboxing, or martial arts stand-up fighting, to unprecedented, new heights.
The ambitious trio recruited a team of highly-accomplished figures from the martial arts fight world to recruit the world's top fight talent and operate GLORY World Series as a major combative sports franchise.
Just five months after launching its live event series in Stockholm, Sweden on May 26, 2012, Glory Sports International sent its first shockwave through the fight world by acquiring rival European kickboxing league 'It's Showtime,' a move that effectively bolstered its talent roster and placed nearly all of the world's best kickboxers under one promotional umbrella.
The transaction - which has been likened to the NFL-AFL merger in terms of bringing a sport's top talents into one league - effectively made possible nearly any match-up between top superstars of the sport.