Can the UFC Make the Next Leap?
The questions I want to explore in this article are simple in nature: Has the UFC peaked in popularity? Can the UFC make another breakthrough to enter the discussion of being one of the major sports in America (a club that currently includes the NFL, NBA, MLB, and to a lesser extent the NHL)? While these may be simple questions to ask the answers are a little more complicated and not all that clear. The UFC has undergone a remarkable run of success over the last decade which saw the organization teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in the early 2000s to gaining a viable foothold in the American sports culture. While the explosion of the sport is unquestioned it still remains on the fringe of the sports culture when compared to the Big 4 mentioned above. Is it possible for the UFC to move into that echelon or has it hit a plateau above which it is unlikely to push beyond? There are both positive and negative signs when investigating the answer to that question and that is what I want to tackle today. I want to take a look at what makes those 4 major sports the dominant forces in the country and whether or not the UFC is likely to ever break through that glass ceiling and assume a place alongside those sports organizations.
I’ve broken it down into 5 categories and want to tackle each one individually and I’ve ranked them in order of importance from least to greatest. There is no question that the last category is the dominant issue at hand and that is why I saved it for last and dedicated the majority of the article to that discussion. Let’s break down the categories:
Monopoly – The one thing the big 4 all have in common is that they are the only game in town. They all have a monopoly on the professional level of their sport in America. There are no other professional leagues mounting any serious challenge to the NFL, MLB, NBA, or NHL. This allows them the advantage of acquiring the best talent in the world and showcasing that talent competing against each other. I know a lot of people hear the word monopoly and instantly associate a negative connotation with the idea but it works perfectly in sports. Rather then having multiple professional leagues where the talent is spread so thin that the overall quality of the product suffers and there is debate about which league has the better players, teams, etc., all of the greatest players compete against each other in the same league and crown an undisputed champion. It provides us as sports fans the best of everything. We get to see world class athletes compete against each other for championships year in and year out, debate about specific games or matchups, and enjoy sports at its highest level. The UFC is well on their way to accomplishing this. They are without a doubt the dominant mixed martial arts (MMA) organization in America and the rest of the world for the most part. It began with the purchase of their biggest rival ever, the Japanese based Pride Fighting Championship, at the end of 2006 and the importation of their top talent and when direct competitors in America have sprung up like Elite XC, Affliction, or Strikeforce they have either been put out of business or purchased. The UFC and its parent company Zuffa, LLC have acquired outstanding talent, not quite all of it in the sport but a large percentage, and have the deepest talent pool from which to create matchups and potentially let the sport flourish under just one banner.
Fantasy Leagues – You might be laughing or doing a double take that this is on the list but think about it for a minute. Has any invention over the last 30 years brought more casual fans into caring about the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL then fantasy sports? Some estimates are that over 40 million people over the age of 12 have played fantasy sports in some form in America and Canada! I know personally I’m in NFL and MLB fantasy leagues. It has become a major driving force behind getting people who would normally not really care one way or another about a sport to have a reason to watch. It pulls in people who aren’t the traditional sports fan because it gives them the forum to hang out with friends or co-workers at the draft, make insulting remarks about the other teams on the message board, and provide an outlet for fun that they normally wouldn’t have pursued. It gives a boost to TV ratings for games and promotes the sport without the individual league really having to do anything…its basically free advertising for them. There have been attempts to run UFC fantasy leagues online but they have never gained any traction. My good friend Charlie and I co-founded a UFC league and ran it for a year and it was a lot of fun but again it didn’t catch any traction outside of the hardcore fans. The reason is that the UFC doesn’t have a set season schedule like the other sports do. Every fighter doesn’t fight on every card and there is no definitive start and finish of a particular season because it is not a seasonal sport with a regular season, playoffs, and then off-season. Another major hindrance is that the vast majority of the fight cards are on pay per view (PPV) which we’re going to talk about in detail in the final category coming up. I wouldn’t say this is essential to the future growth of the sport but finding a way to make it accessible and easy to participate in would be a big boost going forward.
Strong Leadership – No mater what your personal feelings about Dana White might be, one has to admit that he has been a strong leader for the organization. Frank & Lorenzo Fertitta are the majority owners of the company but there is no doubt that the face of the organization is Dana White. He certainly is a polarizing figure that engenders strong feelings, both positive and negative. White’s critics are quick to point to his barroom brawlish type of management style, his constant use of the F-bomb, and disparaging public remarks about other MMA organizations and their fights as unprofessional and damaging to the sport. His supporters will argue that on his watch the company and the sport as a whole have flourished and his tactics, while they might be abrasive and rub people the wrong way, have worked in putting the UFC permanently on the map. This is a characteristic you find in the big 4 as well with legendary names like Pete Rozelle for the NFL and David Stern for the NBA. Leaders with a strong vision and a passion to get their sport to make that vision a reality are indispensable and so far Dana White has made that happen for the UFC.
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Cross-over Stars – There hasn’t been a true MMA star that has made the cross over into the mainstream and more specifically Madison Avenue. Every one of the Big 4 has stars they can hang their collective hats on that a large portion of America, even non sports fans, know who they are: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Sidney Crosby, etc. The UFC hasn’t had that particular star come along yet that breaks through just being known to MMA fans and becomes a national or worldwide celebrity. There are a few reasons for this with the first being that many of the great fighters throughout the sport’s nearly 20 year history haven’t been American. For instance, the two best pound for pound fighters in the world today are Georges St. Pierre (French-Canadian) and Anderson Silva (Brazilian). The great charismatic American born fighter that the public at large could easily identify with hasn’t burst onto the scene yet. Not saying that fighter isn’t a kid training in a gym right now and dreaming of fighting in the UFC someday, but there is one other gigantic obstacle standing in the way of him receiving that kind of exposure and it is our last and most important discussion point…
National Television Exposure – Without question the biggest obstacle laying in front of the UFC in making the leap to the next level. Everyone of the Big 4 has had seminal moments on national television that are ingrained in the history of the sports culture in America. The NFL had the 1958 championship game that went into overtime between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants that was the launching point for the NFL becoming the dominant sport in the country. The NBA, which was on the verge of having multiple teams fold in the late 1970s, had the arrival of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and most importantly the 1984 NBA finals pitting them against one another which was a ratings bonanza. Before that the NBA finals were being shown on tape delay! The ratings from that particular finals laid the ground work for the Michael Jordan era which propelled the NBA to the status it enjoys today. Baseball was already entrenched as the national pastime when both radio and television rose to prominence and was among the very first programs aired on those medium. The NHL is had its moments with Gretzky and Lemieux but has never taken as big a hold in America as the other 3 leagues and is the Marlin Jackson of the group if you will. Every single sport that has ever become entrenched as a permanent fixture in the upper echelon of American sports has done so primiarly through television.
The natural comparison of the UFC is to the sport of boxing because they are both combat sports. Now there are multitudes of reasons for boxing’s decline over the last 25 years: too many weight classes, too many governing bodies, sleazy promoters, loss of young athletes to other sports, atrocious refereeing and judging, etc. But one of the biggest reasons that goes virtually unmentioned is the transition of the sport’s biggest fights to being strictly on PPV or cable channels such as HBO and Showtime. During the 1960s and 1970s boxing was a staple of the programming for the national television networks. Heavyweight championship fights, such as George Foremen against Joe Frazier in 1973 that had the legendary “Down goes Frazier!” call by Howard Cosell was on ABC for the entire country to watch. That is just one example as other legendary fighters like Muhammad Ali, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard, etc. were regularly seen on national television. That exposed them to the vast majority of the American sports fans which built a following for them and made many of them into superstars, especially Ali and Leonard. Once PPV started to gain traction in the 1980s seeing great fights for free on national television disappeared. That began to mark the downward spiral of boxing as major relevant sport in the country. Having the best fights solely on PPV and asking fans to pay in the neighborhood of $50 just for the privilege to watch them severely limits your audience and all but kills the appeal for any casual fans. Once every few years boxing gets a mega-fight which stirs up national interest, like the potential Pacquiao/Mayweather fight that is lurking out there now, but they are rare. They are rare because the boxers don’t get national exposure to build fan followings who would get excited about seeing them fight. The fighters come up fighting strictly on cable now and that rarely build mass appeal. The younger generation now, fans 25 and under, didn’t grow up watching boxing on TV and as a result most of them simply don’t care about the sport. It is the older generation that are still the hardcore boxing fans who talk about the sport with fond memories of watching their favorite fighters growing up and that is what is really keeping boxing afloat. However as that generation gets older and older and is replaced with the younger generation it’s going to be a real body blow to the sport.
The UFC is doing it in reverse. Unlike boxing, which enjoyed a long successful run on national radio and television as a dominant sport in the country for decades, the UFC has only ever known the PPV model. They have never had a fight or event broadcast on one of the major national networks and only recently have they even been broadcast on cable. The initial success of the Ultimate Fighter reality series on Spike provided the spark for hundreds of thousands of unfamiliar fans to be introduced to the sport. I know the show averaged close to 2 million viewers per episode in the initial season but a large percentage were already fans of the sport so I’m not counting them. In any case, it was the impetus to drawing those thousands of new fans to buy future PPV events and return the company to profitability. The seminal television moment to this point for the UFC was at the Ultimate Fighter season 1 finale which aired live on Spike and featured the legendary fight between Stephan Bonner and Forrest Griffin. It is without a doubt the most important fight in the company’s history but also arguably one of the greatest and was witnessed live on TV by millions of viewers. However, that was nearly 6 years ago and it hasn’t been followed up by nearly enough live events since then and as a result the momentum from that night reached a certain level and then leveled out. It made Forrest Griffin into the star and PPV draw that he is today which proves how powerful television exposure at that level is. The Ultimate Fighter series continues to this day and is just concluding its 13 th season but the ratings for the show have dropped off as the seasons progressed, with the exception of season 10 which got a huge ratings boost from Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson being a contestant. The show is still a success and draws about 1.2-1.5 million viewers a week which is solid for a cable television show but it is still just a fraction of the audiences the Big 4 draw on the major networks. There needs to be another avenue to draw in casual fans then just the Ultimate Fighter which isn’t expanding its current audience. This is the overriding factor as to why the organization hasn’t produced the quintessential cross-over star discussed in the last category.
The UFC has done a brilliant job in getting their company to the successful and profitable point it is now with PPV buys generally being in the 600,000 – 800,000 range with their biggest event of UFC 100 doing an estimated 1.6 million, but the question still remains: Can the UFC make the next leap? I just don’t know. They are the first sport that is trying to do it via the PPV market from the outset. In the era of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the other dozen social networking sites that I’m sure will rise to prominence in the next decade, is it possible to continue to grow and expand without network television exposure? I guess it is possible and it will be a fascinating test case to watch unfold. As more kids begin to train specifically in MMA will that cross-over superstar be able to emerge and help push the sport and the UFC further into the mainstream consciousness of American sports fans? I hope so. The UFC has been one of the fastest growing sports organizations in the world over the last 5 years but rising from near nothing to moderate success is much easier then making the leap from being moderately successful to the elite level of the Big 4. The day of seeing “UFC Saturday Night Fights” on NBC or FOX may eventually arrive but it will take some convincing of the network executives that it’s a viable sport with a large enough following to sell to advertisers as well as a change to the UFC’s current revenue model but it could get done.
The answers I’m forced to conclude to the questions posed at the beginning of this article are:
Has the UFC peeked in popularity? Probably.
Can the UFC make the next leap? Unlikely.
My instinct is telling me that we are witnessing the zenith of MMA and the UFC unless some type of breakthrough does happen with one of the major television networks. That is not necessarily a bad thing either. There is still some room for growth left in the current model and the sport is healthy and very entertaining. As an avid MMA fan I’m pulling for the UFC to continue to expand and eventually make that next breakthrough but history tells us the odds are against them but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. If Nicholas Cage can continue to get work and get paid millions to pump out one horrible movie after another then anything is possible!
By Jim McClelland
ProFighting-fans.com MMA Staff Writer