MMA tournament «LION Championship 35»

   An octagonal cage in the middle of the floor, stands on all four sides, and a front row a few metres from the fence. Hanoi gets another night of professional mixed martial arts, and this is the kind of event where the gap between a broadcast and a live hall shows up in the first minute.

   Vietnamese sports media call LION Championship the country's biggest mixed martial arts promotion. Numbered nights come out almost monthly: in 2026 they ran in April, May, June, July and August, and this one is the thirty-fifth. Recent cards carried nine bouts each, opponents flew in from China and the Philippines, and in June the stands were filled to the last seat.

   The short version
The night is branded The Lion Era
The cage sits at the centre of the floor, with floor sections around it and stands on four sides
Title bouts in the series run five rounds, regular bouts three
The organiser had not announced the full pairings at the time of writing

   If you follow Vietnamese MMA, the hall gives you what a screen cannot: you hear the corner shouting, you watch the seconds rewrite the plan between rounds. Newcomers do fine here too, because the bouts are short, the rules read themselves inside one round, and the pauses between pairs leave time to look around.

   Nhà thi đấu Xuân Đỉnh is a roofed sports hall on Xuân La street in the north-west of the city. On a fight night the whole building is rebuilt around the cage: the audience is split across three separate entrances, the blue and red corners get their own rooms behind the stands, and the seats right by the fence are sold as a category of their own.

   The promoter is Công ty Cổ phần Võ thuật Tổng hợp Việt Nam, a company that stages MMA events in Vietnam. Among the partners of the night is the cable television operator VTVcab, whose sports channel ON Sports carried earlier events in the series.

   Hanoi's mixed martial arts scene has turned into a standing fixture this year, and this night is the straightforward way to see it up close instead of on replay.