It has been over a month since Bjorn Rebney resigned from his position as Bellator CEO and there is at least one person out there who is all too pleased with the decision.
Mike Kogan, the now infamous manager of Nate Diaz, was not shy to publicly address his blatant disdain for Rebney, claiming in an interview with Submission Radio that he "left kind of a really dark foot print on Bellator. Not just with us but many other fighters, it's just the way he operated things"
It is not just Kogan who has publicly addressed this issue - fighters like Ben Saunders and Muhammad Lawal were both happy to leave quote worthy remarks about their former boss. Kogan believes that resentment that fighters showed towards him in the end was due to him being short-sighted.
"The truth of the matter is - without getting into too much detail - all of those issues that people have had with Bjorn, all the weirdness and all the crazy stuff going on, that was of his own making. Nobody else made it but him. You know what I mean. He was just a really, really short-sighted person. He only saw like three feet in front of him and that was it. He didn't see anything beyond that."
Kogan refused to offer specific examples to clarify his statements but added that Rebney simply created a terrible work environment for fighters who were not in his good graces.
"90% of the MMA industry is all about relationships, most of the business is all about relationships. And he would just create these environments where it was impossible to have a relationship, and it was just weird, just, I don't know. It was a little weird to be honest with you. I've never met somebody this evil-minded. Like, he was evil minded. Like, he would plot evil shit in his head, and you'd just be like 'wow how do you even think this kind of stuff."
As for his thoughts on Scott Coker, Kogan couldn't be more relieved about the promotion's new CEO or the direction the company will head in henceforth.
"I think it's phenomenal. He hasn't really even started to scratch the surface, you know of what Bellator 2.0's gonna look like. I mean, that's gonna take probably two, three years before you really start to see a monumental change."