Issue 073

March 2011

A significant anniversary for MMA in January. Poignant, indeed. Ten years since Zuffa bought the Ultimate Fighting Championship. A decade in which UFC has gone from indifference to dominance. 

Significantly, it’s over the last five years, with phenomenal growth coupled with an iron-clad business model sustaining it through a global recession, that the UFC, moving into 2011, is now valued at an estimated $1.2 billion. This observer’s feeling is that the coming year will be a telling one. 

But let’s rewind a moment. It is late in the year 2000. After a long and largely unsuccessful battle to secure sanctioning from America’s athletic commissions, original UFC owners Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) stand on the brink of bankruptcy, under fire from all quarters. That was the moment when Station Casinos executives Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, with boxing promoter/manager Dana White, contacted SEG for table talks. The trio offered a purchase price, leaving their offer with a floundering UFC ship. White, at least, thought he had seen something special. A month later, in January 2001, the Fertittas bought the UFC for $2 million and set up Zuffa LLC as the parent entity controlling the Ultimate Fighting Championship. With Lorenzo Fertitta a former member of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Zuffa secured sanction in Nevada.

Eight months thereafter, the UFC returned to pay-per-view (PPV) cable television with UFC 33: Victory in Vegas, at the Mandalay Bay Resort, featuring three championship bouts. Vladimir Matyushenko fought Tito Ortiz for the light heavyweight title, Jens Pulver and Dennis Hallman fought for the lightweight title and Dave Menne and Gil Castillo fought for the newly formed middleweight crown. Chuck Liddell, Matt Serra and Ricardo Almeida were also on the card. For the record, it sold 75,000 pay-per-view buys, had just under 10,000 spectators and grossed $800,000 at the gate. In ten years PPV has increased ten-fold, and some. Sometime in 2011, around late summer, White and the Fertitta brothers will be overseeing their 100th big-card event: UFC 133. I wouldn’t mind betting, with their sense of timing, that they will stage it at the Mandalay Bay. My suggestion on a postcard would be “Return to Victory in Vegas.” In that sense, the coming year is a very significant one but it is worth recalling the hard yards between 2001 and 2006. 

Last year, I sat in Dana White’s office in Las Vegas as he explained “the black hole,” in his own words, that he persuaded his business partners to pour $40 million into, as the organization got off the ground. Prior to The Ultimate Fighter – the non-TUF years, or indeed the ‘really tough’ years – there was no guarantee that the UFC would become the sports entertainment juggernaut that it is today. Looking back, making it was a massive assumption. And, looking forward, there is still an extremely long way to go before mixed martial arts is settled within the mainstream. 

In an editorial for the Las Vegas Sun exactly a year ago, White wrote his vision for the growth of the company in the next decade. On the list were: MMA the biggest sport in the world by 2020; a deal on network television on the agenda; MMA sanctioned in New York State, a target for 2010. Put on the wish list for 2011 the conquest of that citadel. My understanding is that MMA could be sanctioned in New York by the end of the year. A survey in the Sports Business Journal late in 2010 ranked the UFC second as the “organization with most growth potential” alongside Major League Soccer, although just over half of the people surveyed, 53%, believe the UFC may have peaked already. I doubt it, somehow, given the intrepid drives into the sub-continental Asian and Chinese markets planned for 2011. The greatest issue is the need to do more marketing ‘to educate’, with many of those not familiar with the sport still wondering if it is fake. Or where there is no ground game, getting neophyte observers’ heads around grappling on the mat. 

The same could be said for journalism within MMA. It has come a long way in recent years, but there is still far to go in persuading mainstream journalism’s hefty center to filter into the sport. Add three more items to the wish list for the coming year: education, education, education. 

Strikeforce Export?

Elsewhere, there are hints that California promotion Strikeforce may be considering events overseas, possibly in the UK. That could depend on the success of Paul Daley, as he would be a draw as a headline event on the island.