Interesting, but UFC 93 is gonna be in Vegas on January 31st.
This could be a tape delayed show for Spike, but you’d think they’d put it closer to the PPV.

Good find.

I asked Marshall Zelaznik (The president of the UFC’s UK operations) about this a few months back, as I was looking for some advance info on when the planned UK and European shows were taking place, so as to do some forward planning with respect to travelling to shoot the shows.

Anyways, the UFC are very keen to put on a show in the Irish Republic and would love it to be in Dublin but the stumbling block was that arena (The Point… now the O2, I believe) didn’t have enough capacity to book an event.

To put this in perspective: the UFC looks for venues which can host at least 10,000 – 12,000 in seating and – ideally – up to 16,000 capacity. It’s very expensive for the UFC to put on shows outwith the US and they need to recoup those expenses with a decent live gate. This is one of the key reasons the UFC won’t be in Scotland for a while (sucks for me… I’d love a show in my back yard) since we don’t have any venues that can support that capacity at this point in time.

Anyways, Marshall had said that the Point / O2 was undergoing expansion and, as soon as the renovations were complete and they had capacity, an event would be booked there. It’s set to re-open in December and should have a capacity of about 13,000 when complete. The first event, a Coldplay gig, is booked for 21st December and is on sale now.

Going on to the timing. We had UFC 80 in Newcastle in January, UFC 85 in London in June, then UFC 89 taking place just two weeks from now in Birmingham. That’s averaging four months between events, so the next Euro event could be sometime in January or February. This happens for two reasons

1. The UFC wants around three months to max out ticket sales… they’ve made a science out of this and they know that a 12 week build up is about right in terms of filling their arenas.

2. Fighter downtime between events; the UFC populates the undercards and some of the main card with local talent and popular fighters where possible – which makes sense, as it draws local support. Think Jess Liaudin, Paul Taylor, Paul Kelly, Terry Etim and some of the newer UK fighters. All of these guys are fighting at UFC 89 so will need post-fight downtime of around four months to either a) have layoff and then get back into training or b) recover from injury (including mandatory downtime)

They’d also want to book fighters such as Marcus Davis and Forrest Griffin on these cards; Davis is incredibly proud of his Irish heritage and said to me that he’d jump at the chance to fight in his ‘homeland’ – the same is true of Griffin as well, who was energized by the reception he received in Belfast at ’72 and has feelings similar to Davis. Both fighters would be major draws for an Irish event.

In closing, we might well see an event on Irish soil in the very near future. I’ll ask Marshall about it when I see him again in a few weeks time. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did take place on January 17 and we still also have the rumoured superbowl weekend show in Vegas on the 31st as well. The UFC can and does run events very close together – witness the one-week delay between 89 and 90. If I find out anything I’ll be sure to share it when I can.