Harry "Haroon" Ali
Harry "Haroon" Ali is the creator of 30-0 and writes The Corner. He is a lifelong mixed martial arts fan who has dabbled in most of the disciplines the sport is built from over the years, and who built 30-0 because the arguments MMA fans have in group chats deserved a better answer than "we will never know".
Why he writes about this
Most MMA writing is reporting: what happened on Saturday, who said what at the press conference. The Corner is not that. It exists to answer the questions the sport never gets to settle on its own. Who really wins when two great fighters are in their primes ten years apart? Where do unbeaten runs actually die? What would it genuinely take to go one better than the greatest record the sport has ever produced?
Those questions have answers, or at least defensible estimates, and a bit of mat time helps. Having messed about in a boxing gym, on the mats, and in the clinch is what stops a fighter rating being a popularity contest. It is the difference between knowing a fighter is famous and understanding why a particular style beats another one, why a chin goes before the legs do, and why the third round is where most reputations actually get made.
Time in the gym
Harry is a casual martial artist, not a competitor, and that is the honest framing. He has dabbled across striking and grappling over the years: boxing and kickboxing for hands and distance, muay thai for the clinch, and jiu jitsu and judo for takedowns and control. Not enough to make a fighter of anyone, but enough time on the pads and mats to know how the techniques feel when they are done to you, which is a different kind of knowledge from watching them on a screen.
That grounding runs directly into the game. The six attributes every fighter in 30-0 is rated on, striking, power, grappling, submission defence, chin and cardio, are the things that actually decide fights, and the trap picks in the draft, the aging icon, the glass cannon, the one-trick submission specialist, are the mistakes real fans make when they let a name do the thinking for them.
On the ratings
Every rating on 30-0 is an independent interpretation of publicly available data: records, results, methods of victory, and the eras those results happened in. No video game data and no ratings provider is used as a source. Where a call is contentious, the aim is to say so rather than hide behind a number.