Dakota Ditcheva has become the face of the PFL, and one of the most marketable fighters in the sport, but even as she hits the prime of her career at 27 years old, she’s already thinking about the day she calls it a career.
As she prepares for her return to action for the first time in over a year after dealing with injuries, Ditcheva recently mentioned that she was eyeing retirement by 32, but that’s not exactly a steadfast deadline. Instead, Ditcheva clarified those remarks by explaining why she’s even talking about retirement at this stage of her career, especially as she’s just now starting to reach her true potential.
“I think that is what I’ve seen my whole life is fighters say ‘you know I’m just fighting basically for the money now’ or ‘I’m fighting just because I can’t let go of it,’” Ditcheva explained when speaking to MMA Fighting. “I don’t want to be in a position where I can’t let go of fighting. I want to be able to love other things at the same time. That’s my goal. I’m not saying 32, but I do want a family and children, and that’s a very hard thing to build when you’re putting so much into your career.
“I live a single life, all the time, it’s so difficult to even think about one day having a family and it’s important to me. I feel like I have to have that cutoff in the back of my mind to be like, I can be done with it at this age and move onto something else. I don’t want to be one of them people that’s like oh yeah, I’m going to retire and then has to come back until I’m 38. I don’t want to do that.”
Ditcheva definitely has a lot more she wants to accomplish in the sport before she retires, but she’s also well aware that even some of the best fighters in the history of the sport struggle to walk away when it’s time.
She learned a valuable lesson about the difficulty she might face one day when thinking about retirement after she ran through the PFL women’s flyweight tournament, which crowned her as champion at the end.
“I feel like us as fighters are never satisfied,” Ditcheva said. “I felt it already winning a PFL world championship tournament. I thought I was going to be like oh my god, I’ve got this crazy feeling like I’ve done it! I was over it in two days. Our careers are always going to be like that. We’re going to have this really big high and then it’s like now what?”
Ditcheva has also gained a lot of valuable advice about the right time to walk away from fighting from her mother, who was a multi-time kickboxing champion during her own career.
“My mom’s always made it really clear to me that one of her biggest mistakes was she never set herself [up] for after fighting,” Ditcheva said. “That’s why she says to me now ‘you’ve got to know your worth, you’ve got to get paid right, you’ve got to go into business and put your money in the right places’ and also you want to be a public figure that can go into other things like commentating, or I can run a gym afterwards, or I can do a bit of modeling somewhere, or I can be an actor. That’s kind of where I’m at with all this.”
Right now, Ditcheva is solely focused on her next fight at the PFL New York City card in July and then hopefully getting more active after missing so much time with a hand injury.
But acknowledging that she doesn’t want to fight forever just makes Ditcheva that much more motivated to accomplish everything she wants before time runs out.
While she’s not saying 32 years old is definitively when she’s done with fighting, Ditcheva also doesn’t want to overstay her welcome or stick around MMA for the wrong reasons.
That’s why she’s already thinking about a future beyond MMA but that’s still years away from now.
“I don’t want to be 32 thinking yeah, I’m going to retire and now I’m like now what?” Ditcheva said. “I want to set a time and OK I’m 32, I’m done, let’s move onto something else or 33, that type of thing. I just want to not be a person that’s going to be here forever.”
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