About
All Strikers.One Arena.
KOMBA is a unique experience where the best strikers in all combat sports clash to put on an entertaining show.
The vision
The Experience For Fight Fans.
We envision an immersive experience gathering both fight fans and newcomers around a shared interest.
In practice that means a night you can walk into knowing nothing. No federation glossary, no eight belts in one weight class, no waiting out six rounds for something to happen. The rules are short enough to explain between fights, and the show around them is built so the hour between the walkouts is worth the ticket on its own.
One arena
Every striking sport has a best. They never meet.
Karate has world champions. So do Thai boxing, kickboxing, K-1, sanda and taekwondo — and almost none of them ever share a ring. Every sport keeps its own federations, its own scoring, its own belts and its own idea of what a good fight looks like. Two of the best strikers alive can spend a career training forty minutes apart in Copenhagen and never once find out.
KOMBA is where that stops. One ring, one rule set, and a card matched so the styles have to answer each other — the karateka’s timing against the Thai boxer’s clinch, the kickboxer’s volume against someone who has spent fifteen years learning to walk through it. It is the question the sport has been politely avoiding, and we ask it on a Saturday night in front of a room.
KOMBA 1.0 put fighters from five countries — Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Turkey and Morocco — on one card at K.B. Hallen.
Muay ThaiK-1KickboxingTaekwondoBoxingKarate
The rules
Short enough to explainbetween fights.
A KOMBA fight is not a compromise between six rule sets. It is one, written from scratch, and it is written to be watched — every line in it exists to make the next ninety seconds worth looking at.
Four things that are different
Professionals only
No amateur bouts padding out the card. Everyone who walks to the ring does this for a living, and is matched against someone who does too.
Small gloves
Closer to what the sport looks like at its sharpest, and closer to what a knockout actually is. It shortens fights, which is the point.
Ground and pound
The best thing MMA has, allowed inside a striking fight. Nobody else in striking will write this rule. A knockdown stops being a pause.
Cross-sport
Karate, Thai boxing, kickboxing — whatever you came up in, you meet on the same terms. No style gets its own scoring, and no style gets a home advantage.
Who we are
We are bold, different and redefining.
Elevated Fight Experience.
Redefining The Fight Experience.
Lauge Milling Petersen
Co-founder · Head of product
Houdaifa Harrar
Co-founder · Commercial director
Youssef Assouik.
Co-founder and president · ONE Championship fighter
KOMBA has a front figure, and he is still fighting. Youssef Assouik built the promotion out of the sport he has spent half his life inside — and he is the reason the room believes a Danish card can hold a world title.
“You had to have your hands up.”
He grew up in Nordvest, in Copenhagen, and by fourteen he was known at the local police station. His father had already pushed him into a dojo; it was Muay Thai, found at fifteen on a summer in Morocco, that took. The sport is what he did with the rest of it.
What followed is on the record, and most of it is above: world titles in Muay Thai and in K-1, a European belt, an IFMA gold, four defences of an ISKA world title. Alongside all of it he trained as a social worker. He runs his own gym in Copenhagen and Fighterhjertet, a company that works with municipalities to reach children and teenagers heading the way he was heading — the half of the job DR and TV 2 keep coming back to.
In October 2024 he walked out in Bangkok for his ONE Championship debut and took a decision over Sinsamut Klinmee. He had been promoting his own cards since 2021, as Assouik Fight Night, and telling anyone who would listen that being a fighter, a trainer and a promoter at once was not a contradiction. KOMBA is what that argument turned into.
The belts
- 2023WMC world championMiddleweight · Handed back the same year, on principle
- 2022IFMA world champion−75 kg · Amateur world championship
- 2022WMC European championSuper middleweight
- 2018Tatneft Cup winner−70 kg
- 2017ISKA world championK-1 light middleweight · Four defences
- 2016ISKA European championMuay Thai 67 kg
- 2012IFMA junior world champion−60 kg · The first Danish junior gold at the championships
DR and TV 2 have both spent a piece on him — on the belts, and more often on the gym. Their words, on their pages.
Read the coverage