Issue 072

February 2011

Our soothsayer looks forward to the coming year... with varying levels of plausibilty.

Exercise the MMA Way 

These days, every self-respecting old folks’ home has a Nintendo Wii, and millions of other non-traditional gamers will happily bounce around their living rooms like demented kittens, controller in sweaty hand. The exercise-videogame market is already crowded but UFC Personal Trainer, due out in April for the Playstation 3 Move and Xbox 360 Kinect, promises something far more intense than the average title. Potentially an even bigger moneyspinner than the Undisputed series, it should be a great way of pushing the UFC brand to fitness-obsessed non-fans, and especially for the females who buy most of these games. Of course, quite how you can recreate the Diego Sanchez ‘Yes!’ cartwheel is a question the game’s producers at THQ will need to get their heads around.

Major League MMA to hit China?

Every major international company with a strong brand is hungrily eyeing the gargantuan Chinese market. Yum!, the fast-food giants behind KFC and Pizza Hut, has thousands of outlets in the country, earning a third of its money there. The NBA has been boosted tremendously in China by the popularity of the Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming. So it’s no surprise that the UFC is so heavily into it’s Asian operations. With a history and culture steeped in the martial arts, China should be hugely receptive to major league MMA. If the UFC can uncover more quality Chinese fighters like Tie Quan ‘The Mongolian Wolf’ Zhang (and there is already a small but growing scene over there) it could be well on its way to yet another resounding international success.

Internet TV, the (dim and distant) future

While he may not always believe in the wisdom of the Internet, Dana White has often said the future is online pay-per-view. The technology to deliver live and archived fights has been in place for a few years, and, as quality and security improves, it will almost certainly be the entertainment medium of the future, as long as companies can get people to pay for content. Still, plenty of MMA promotions have already seen that even the biggest global footprint may not leave particularly deep tracks. BodogFight aired its television show on its website and EliteXC’s astronomical losses were partly down to the failure of its social networking offshoot. But all past blind avenues aside, a properly organized, technologically sound, money-making online channel is coming, but you might still want to keep your TV remote handy for a good few years yet.

Reality show fun! 

Fly-on-the-wall TV may be staler than the ‘special offers’ a bum picks out of the restaurant bins, but given the right premise, and the right cast of characters, reality television can still deliver big ratings. And although The Ultimate Fighter is getting a little long in the tooth, there’s surely room on one of the bajillion TV-networks out there for a brand-new MMA reality show. And no, I don’t mean Fighting Fedor. The ideal one is sitting there ready to go. Let’s call it, At Home with the Diaz Boys. Surely the title’s enough to get you hooked? No, really? Think of the possibilities: Nick and Nate just being themselves, training with Cesar Gracie’s camp, picking fights, muttering incomprehensibly, throwing wacky hand gestures, beating up Jason Miller or holidaying in Hawaii. This is an absolute, cast-iron guarantee of a cult classic.

No more boring fights

After years of casual fans complaining about boring fights, a solution has finally arrived. Not a yellow card system, or a change in judging criteria, or refs being more pro-active in forcing people to do their job, nor even whacking-great cash bonuses: the answer is the cage itself. A smaller cage might help (it certainly contributed to WEC fight quality), but how about something a little more exciting? Like a cage that contracts, closing on the participants if they try and run away or lay ‘n’ pray? Give the controls to a dedicated ‘entertainment official’ with instructions to bring the walls in on fighters who mess about too much, and sooner or later the only thing they’ll have room to do is get in each other’s faces and fight it out like underwater adventurers trapped in a shark cage with a hammerhead.