I remember back when I was a super fan of UFC. I looked forward to every Pay per view event and for the most part myself and my friends would meet up somewhere and really take it all in and have a great time.
These days, events pass us all by and none of us really even knew about it. This last event is a true indicator of this because it wasn't until I looked on a sports site where I was actually looking for information about Ric Flair getting injured in the street outside a restaurant that I even knew a championship was on the line this past weekend.
I'm not going to get into the details of this fight other than Volkanovski won the fight by TKO in the 2nd round. His opponent? A guy named Movsar Evloev and if you don't know who the hell that is, get in line because it seems almost nobody else does either.
Such is the way of UFC having a "major" event every single month whether there is any interest in the fights or not.
While this graph is relating to UFC on Fox, which no longer exists, the trend that this graph indicates has been continuing. I don't know exactly when it happened, but there seems to have been a talent drain in the ranks of UFC as well as an increase in the amount of events that they have. How anyone thought this would work is beyond me. I am a guy that used to follow all the categories / weight classes and took a real interest in the women's division as well. These days I don't even know who the champions are in a division if it didn't happen in the past month or so.
I had forgotten that Volkanovski was even the champion.
Recent events for UFC have not been selling out and this is something that I believe that organization never thought it would see. I mean, of course a brand with the global recognition of UFC can sell out 15,000 person arenas, right? Well, apparently not and UFC doesn't really seem to have an answer for this.
The hype trains that they try to start on various competitors gets sidetracked by stories of poor fighter pay and this dominates the news cycle. Fan favorites like Sean Strickland rightfully want some of the "McGregor money" but UFC, Zuffa, and in particular Dana White, insist that there is no more money to pay these guys despite the fact that their financial statements indicate exactly the opposite.
They may be milking this cash cow until the point comes where very few people are interested in it anymore.
UFC tries to pack the front rows with celebrities to create the illusion of popularity, but a recent slip-up of some attendees in Abu Dhabi revealed that the celebrities aren't just getting their prestigious seats for free, some of them are being compensated to attend at all. I recall days when celebrities and the ultra-wealthy would be climbing all over one another trying to get a ticket up front at all. Now UFC is paying big names to come to the events.
To make matters worse, the media seems to have it out for UFC and especially Dana White because of his friendship and affiliation with a particular unpopular President of the United States.
One would think that a response to decreased interest in something would be to reduce the cost of the tickets but UFC is strangely doing the opposite. The prices of tickets continues to go up even at events where the public hasn't expressed a great deal of interest in it... such as the Volkanovski card where once you exit the top 3 matches, very few people even know who any of these people even are.
When UFC stopped doing PPV's and moved to stream exclusively on Paramount this multi-billion dollar deal was supposed to INCREASE viewership as well as make Paramount a massive player in the streaming game. This has not ended up being the case.
I know I cancelled my subscription and when I talk to my friends none of them even had one to start with. UFC was unable to generate the sort of redirection of customers.
Of course this data is hidden very well because streaming services don't have to report how many people tuned in. They claim that they don't have the technology to determine this but I think what is really going on is that they want to keep this information hidden.
If you are a UFC fan, do you even know what any of the upcoming events are? I know I don't.
There are a lot of problems with UFC's current model but a lot of it boils down to sheer greed. I tuned out of numbered UFC events because they started to feel as if they were, and then they became a 4 hour advertisement for various products that just happens to have a fight or two in them every now and then. This is not FUN. It's not entertaining, and people who pay for a streaming service are generally not very keen on advertising breaks being heavily built into their programming.
I honestly don't know what they can do to bring people back. Conor McGregor or Jon Jones are no longer a part of the everyday operations and the people that do become household names are getting pissed off at bad pay with increasing levels of frequency.
At some point I think that Dana and co are going to have to start sharing some of that money if they want this to remain. But maybe they don't care. They already have the billions and perhaps they are content to see it burn to the ground.
