Issue 045
January 2009
Walking away with practically every prize they and their fighters were eligible for in the first ever World Mixed Martial Arts Awards, the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC) yet again showed off their thorough supremacy of the entire sport.
It’s a dominance that shines through again and again in more than just awards voting, and proves beyond all doubt the UFC are the undisputed kings of MMA. Andrew Garvey salutes and celebrates their success.
Business First
As much as sports fans often hate to admit it, their favourite teams, events, and organisations are first and foremost a business. Every MMA promotion’s primary concern should be how they can make money. This isn’t a matter of evil moneymen ‘exploiting’ the sport for profit: it’s simple economics.
Even with the backing of enthusiastic billionaires or major TV channels, sooner or later an MMA promotion has to actually make some money on its own merits in order to survive. Even Japan’s mighty Pride FC, despite routinely packing some 30,000 fans into the Saitama Super Arena, weren’t financially viable once Fuji TV pulled the rug out from under them. Without that financial muscle, Pride FC was dead inside a year.
Thankfully, the UFC actually make money, a real rarity in a sport where a handful of recently deceased promotions have lost well over $100 million between them. And the UFC don’t just make enough cash to scrape by – they make money hand over fist, and reinvest huge amounts back into their business.
Buying the UFC for just $2 million from the indebted, creatively stagnant SEG in January 2001, current owners Zuffa fought hard to save the sport from a grubby near-extinction, first by getting it back on major pay-per-view systems, and a few years later inking their all-important deal with Spike TV. After years of losing money and struggling to legitimise a seemingly ultra-violent pseudo-sport with a public profile that ranged from invisible to vehemently negative, Zuffa owners the Fertitta brothers and Dana White (their high school buddy turned greatest promoter in MMA history) are now reaping the well-earned rewards.
At their lowest point, Zuffa were $44million in the hole. On the surface that seems little different to the $50 million the IFL lost and the near $60million EliteXC bled in their short lifetimes, but there are some key differences. Zuffa lost millions over a much longer period, and at a time when the chances of actually making money promoting the sport were miniscule. With no television to promote pay-per-view events and almost no media coverage beyond yellow journalism that shrieked “blood sport”, “no rules”, and “human cockfighting”, promoting MMA in 2001 was a completely different proposition to promoting MMA in 2008. All the competing promotions that have died by the roadside did so due to their own failures. This was despite initially piggybacking on Zuffa’s work to legitimise the sport, and being lured into the business by the UFC’s runaway success in 2006 when they generated over $220 million in pay-per-view revenue alone.
The numbers speak for themselves. With the UFC struggling for survival in November 2002, the grudge fight between Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock was a huge success, pulling in $1.54 million in ticket sales and shifting 150,000 pay-per-view buys. When Ortiz and Shamrock fought again in July 2006, gate receipts were a whopping $3.35 million and pay-per-view buys were up to 775,000. And those numbers aren’t even the highest in the promotion’s history.
Georges St Pierre and Matt Serra’s April 2008 rematch pulled in a stunning $5.1 million at the gate while Ortiz’s second fight with Chuck Liddell in December 2006 convinced 1,050,000 people across North America to order the show from the comfort of their armchairs. Quite simply, the UFC are just much, much better at promoting MMA than anyone else on the planet. That’s why they make so much money.
Even trying to argue the point, as some rival promoters have done, is beyond ludicrous. Both Gary Shaw (when heading EliteXC) and Jay Larkin (at the helm of a dying IFL) criticised the UFC business model. EliteXC and the IFL are dead, while the UFC is alive, healthy, profitable, valued at around $1 billion by business experts Forbes, and (sometimes quite literally) laughing in the face of those who try and muscle in on their hard-won territory.
Branding & Expanding
Anyone who has spent time studying the business world will tell you about the importance of branding. The UFC isn’t just the leading brand in MMA; it’s the only brand that matters. Dana White loves to compare the UFC to the NFL, and in terms of branding his company is doing even better.
If, as a casual sports fan, you’re flipping through the channels and you see a bunch of humungous men in brightly-coloured armour running around smashing into each other, stopping, having a long chat, then starting all over again, you know you’re watching American football. The sport is instantly recognisable by its generic name, not by its dominant organisation or league.
But if, as that same casual sports fan, you’re watching two barefooted men in their underpants fighting in a cage in front of 15,000 fans, you don’t say you’re watching MMA, you say you’re watching UFC, and plenty of the corporate world’s heaviest hitters – such as Budweiser, Toyota, Visa, Burger King, and Harley Davidson – have realised that, eagerly leaping aboard the all-conquering UFC bandwagon.
Those big names are just the tip of the iceberg. Spike TV executive Kevin Kay recently noted that since the summer of 2007, 59 new advertisers have signed on for Spike’s UFC programming. It’s all a far cry from a few years ago when UFC events were sponsored only by the promotion’s own DVDs, dodgy action movies, inferior beers, and energy drinks.
The UFC bandwagon isn’t just rolling across the USA either. Last year they returned to the UK for the first time since a costly one-off experiment in 2002. The UFC 70 re-debut was the first of (to date) seven consecutive sell-outs in the UK and Ireland. The seventh of those, UFC 93, takes place in Dublin on January 17th, 2009, and every single ticket had gone by early November. UFC shows have set records for gate receipts at such prestigious venues as the MEN Arena in Manchester and the O2 Arena in London.
With a busy London office and at least four events a year on the books, the UFC are in Britain to stay, and looking towards the rest of Europe and the world, with a 2009 German debut looking certain and plans in the works for shows in Japan, Australia, and the Philippines. No other MMA promotion has – or has ever had – the brand identity, the international ambitions and the very real global reach of the UFC. In the world of MMA, the UFC is Coca Cola, and Pepsi doesn’t even exist.
Media Matters
A few years ago any MMA fan wanting to watch the sport had severely limited options. They could wait a few months between each pay per view, they could hunt down bootleg videotapes, or if they were computer literate enough they could find low-quality footage on that new-fangled Internet. Now, both in Britain and North America, they just have to switch on their TV sets. And yes, they have the UFC to thank for it.
The Ultimate Fighter changed the way millions of people watch MMA. Its surprising success brought in masses of new viewers. A delighted Spike TV commissioned more seasons, not to mention even more UFC programming (like UFC Unleashed, Inside the UFC, UFC All Access, UFC Countdown specials, and, best of all, live UFC Fight Night events). As usually happens in the world of television, what works for one station is copied by another and another and another. Not only is Spike TV awash with UFC programming (an approach both Bravo and Setanta Sports have taken in the UK) but HDNet have built their entire station around a myriad of MMA shows, and Showtime, CBS, and NBC have got in on the action too.
Just as television covers MMA in a completely different way these days, so do the print media and news websites. Until recently, mainstream sports websites like Yahoo! Sports, SI.com (Sports Illustrated), and ESPN ignored the sport. Now they – along with the likes of NBC’s website, and major US newspapers such as the New York Post and many more far too numerous to list – cover the sport regularly. Most importantly, they cover it as just that: a sport.
The days of ‘shocking’ exposés are seemingly (and mercifully) long gone. And yes, the UFC are largely the ones to thank, since they are the ones who brought the sport to its current level of popularity and because they have worked with mainstream media outlets, helping their writers to understand, appreciate, and cover the sport. The UK is a perfect case study of this. Since early 2007, the promotion’s UK office have reached out to boxing writers and general sportswriters, men’s magazines, and newspapers. The result? Frequent magazine features and regular sports coverage in daily newspapers as diverse as the unashamedly tabloid Daily Star and the traditional broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph. Some may complain that such coverage is utterly UFC-based and ignores the rest of the MMA world, but the UFC is the leading brand by a ridiculously wide margin, and are the ones responsible for securing the coverage in the first place.
For the Greater Good
The UFC’s dominance benefits far more than just itself. Their work to legitimise the sport and have it sanctioned and accepted by the mainstream should be welcomed by anyone and everyone who genuinely cares about MMA. Having events sanctioned by state athletic commissions in the US quickly negates any argument about the sport’s legitimacy in its biggest marketplace. Athletic commissions are funded by state governments and charged with doing everything they can to ensure fighter safety, promoter accountability and financial probity. When sanctioning works well it means independent drug testing, transparent financial reporting, rigorous safety standards, and promoters required to prove they actually have enough money to pay their fighters. While sanctioning may bring some bureaucratic headaches, its positive points far outweigh that. At the time of writing, 36 of the 44 US states that have athletic commissions sanction and regulate MMA, with New York state as the final major prize. Company policy is to only promote events in states where the sport is fully, officially regulated. The UFC are the only major MMA promotion to have pushed for such widespread regulation and strictly adhered to such a policy. They are certainly the only ones to appoint someone of the stature of the universally-respected former head of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Marc Ratner, to push this forwards.
Even when they step outside the US, regulatory standards don’t slip. Ratner plays the part of the commission on every UK show, enforcing all of the same standards, and sometimes even more. Standard practice in the US is to drug test main-event fighters, participants in title fights. and a few other randomly selected fighters. At UFC 89 in Birmingham, every single fighter on the show was drug tested at the company’s expense. And when Chris Leben failed his test, the UFC elected to publicise the matter and suspend a popular and charismatic fighter for nine months.
They could very easily have swept the whole episode under the carpet, but chose not to. Given that comparable promotions and bodies like the WWE, the NFL, the US Olympic Selection Committee and at least one other MMA promotion have (allegedly) whitewashed similar drug test failures in the past, Zuffa’s honesty in the Leben case speaks volumes for their very real intention to clean up what can, at times, be a pretty dirty business.
The Best of the Best
How about one final measure of an organisation’s success? That of promoting and matching up the best fighters in the sport. The UFC is comfortably ahead of the competition. Compiling top-ten rankings in a sport this unpredictable and fast changing is a fool’s errand, but those offered by www.mmaweekly.com are generally regarded as the least risible out there. At the time of writing, their most recent (November 12th, 2008) rankings have UFC-contracted fighters occupying 25 of the 50 available ranking positions between lightweight and heavyweight. UFC fighters take up nine of the light heavyweight slots and eight more at welterweight, while the promotion’s champions are recognised as number one everywhere but heavyweight, where the Internet favourite, Fedor Emelianenko, still rules the roost.
No other MMA promotion worldwide even comes close to having 50% of the sport’s very best on their books. UFC’s nearest competitor in this respect, with 20% (mostly at lightweight) of the world’s best is Japan’s DREAM. But realistically, DREAM are so geographically distant (not to mention being firmly on the ‘endangered promotions’ list) that it seems odd to count them as a genuine competitor to the primarily western UFC. The rest of the best are scattered among several different promotions. With the precarious or outright finished state of plenty of these groups, expect the UFC to make a few signings over the next months and increase their share of the top fighters to at least 70% by the end of 2009, further cementing their complete and thoroughly deserved mastery of the entire sport.
Youth Movement
Of more than 180 fighters on the UFC’s books a hefty 35 of them are aged 25 or under. The list includes the likes of Thiago Alves, Nate Diaz, Junior Dos Santos, Terry Etim, Tyson Griffin, Dustin Hazelett, Roger Huerta, Anthony Johnson, Joe Lauzon, Jim Miller, Goran Reljic, Thiago Silva, Jeremy Stephens, and Sam Stout.
Shifting the age limit up just a year brings in a crop of 26-year-olds led by Cain Velasquez, Diego Sanchez, and Dan Hardy that pushes that number of ‘young fighters’ up to almost 50. In a sport where the real superstars, the headliners and the champions, tend to be over the age of 30, having such a large proportion of young competitors with plenty of time to develop into truly great fighters and genuine superstars speaks volumes for the UFC’s long-term commitment and vision, not to mention a future that looks very bright indeed.
More, More, More!
No other promotion even comes close to having the resources, or the ability, to provide MMA’s seemingly insatiable fan base with the action they want to see on an ever-more regular basis. Take a look at the sheer number of live events the Zuffa-owned UFC has promoted each year:
2001 5
2002 7
2003 5
2004 5
2005 9
2006 18
2007 19
2008 20
...
