Remember When Zuffa Bought PRIDE?
by Luke Thomas on Mar 27, 2009 10:13 AM EDT
in MMA News
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PrintAnd $70 million nearly disappeared into thin air two years ago today:
“We have been talking to Pride for probably about 11 months,” said Lorenzo Fertitta, according to an Associated Press report. “It’s been a long, drawn-out process, but we finally were able to put the two brands together.”
The deal between the two mixed martial arts superpowers was supposed to usher in an unprecedented era of matchmaking. Talk of mega-bouts featuring standouts from the rival promotions spread like wildfire. The possibilities seemed endless. Fertitta even spoke of turning MMA into a global sport on par with baseball and soccer.
“This is really going to change the face of MMA -- literally creating a sport that could be as big around the world as soccer,” he said. “I liken it somewhat to when the [NFL] and [AFL] came together to create the NFL [of today].”
At least they got PRIDE's video library. This adventure was a Zuffa misstep, but they've clearly learned from it. And they're better for it.
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It wasn’t a total mistep.
1. There was a lot of competition at the time, including interest from non MMA guys.
2. It was a very symbolic purchase, and made no doubts that they were the #1 promotion in the world.
They definitely paid too much, but there were many more intangibles to the deal then just fighter contracts and a tape library.
by AlwaysRelaxing on Mar 27, 2009 10:12 AM EDT reply actions
“It wasn’t a total mistep.”
I know. Which is why I didn’t say it was. But it was more mistake than success. A helpful, informative mistake they’ve clearly learned from (and not sure how avoidable it was), but a mistake nevertheless. Hindsight’s always 20/20, though. I don’t beat Zuffa up over it.
by Luke Thomas on Mar 27, 2009 10:17 AM EDT up reply actions
I agree. I think when they purchased Pride, they had visions of having tons of super cards, events in both America and Japan. And ahving every single Top 10 fighter under contract.
Didn’t exactly go that way.
by AlwaysRelaxing on Mar 27, 2009 10:23 AM EDT up reply actions
The deal would probably look complete different
if more of the Pride associated fighters were perfroming better.
Wandy, Shogun, Nog, CroCrop, etc…at the top of their game would have made this seem like a genius move.
by Razreshat on Mar 27, 2009 10:34 AM EDT up reply actions 1 recs
If only they got Fedor
I think it would have been worth it. The fact that most of the Pride stars have underperformed has really hurt the vision of this purchase.
The biggest miss in the whole Pride deal was the UFC did not get Bas Rutten to do their color commentary!!! (I know he left Pride years before but he is hands down the best color man in MMA)
by GroundNPound561 on Mar 27, 2009 11:45 AM EDT up reply actions
one word…Fedor.
by BJJDenver on Mar 27, 2009 10:52 AM EDT
Just bustin balls, lol!
Seriously, I agree with this aspect of the deal. If Fedro had come to the UFC, I can’t help but believe it would have completely changed the perception of the buyout.
If you're not submitting, you're just rolling around with another guy.
Bas...oh god no!
Bas now days is basically rambling incoherently and barely paying attention to the fights. Oh, and he takes himself waaaaay to seriously. He’s basically retired on air whenever I’ve gotten up the nerve to stomache him for more that 10 minutes on HDNet.
Cro COp and Nog were already in the UFC before the PRIDE deal.
by MMASuPreMaCy on Mar 27, 2009 1:37 PM EDT up reply actions
The only fighters that I can think of that actually came out of the deal are Dan Henderson, Wanderlei and Shogun and they had to sign all new contracts to get Silva and Rua.
Yups. Fighters really had nothing to do with the deal.
I am not sure why people keep bringing it up.
by MMASuPreMaCy on Mar 27, 2009 2:51 PM EDT up reply actions
Well the ufc owning the video library has hurt affliction for sure. They have virtually no footage of their top fighter to hype up fights.
Yeah, who got the final Death Blow? 'Cause I thought that Hawaiian guy had it comin' to him. - C. K.
by monkeyfightclub! on Mar 27, 2009 10:45 AM EDT reply actions
Totally agree here. Zuffa will make a good amount of money releasing old Pride shows on both DVD and Blu-ray. I imagine part of the holdup on production is that Zuffa isn’t interested in increasing awareness and basically giving free advertising for their competition by showcasing fighters not under Zuffa contract in all their Pride glory.
"Japan is half-Machida" - iiowyn
When are those old Japanese events going to be worth money in the US if it’s not when those guys are getting attention here? Heck Fedor controls his own footage so they can’t even release events he was on without editing him out and FSN may still have tv distribution rights on the footage. They may one day make a bit of money off DVDs of those old shows but I can’t imagine it would be that much and it definatly won’t be worth $70million.
Their second show’s commercials were basically a loop of Fedor choking Timmy again…and again…and again…
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. -Samuel Beckett
by Scott C. Broussard on Mar 27, 2009 1:26 PM EDT up reply actions
The UFC didn’t get the fighter contracts, they didn’t get an opening into Japan out of it, they did supposibly get the film library but to be honest we haven’t seen much from it since(except FSN replaying the old Pride episodes). It honestly looks like a situation where DSE took Zuffa for a $70 million dollar ride.
Maybe it’s just me getting more into MMA over the years but it seems like since they bought Pride that their cards have been deeper in talent. It seems like before 07 that a lot of the guys on the undercard didn’t belong in a major org, much less the UFC whereas now I look at the undercard and wish some of those fights were televised. But pre-2005 I was just a casual fan so it could also be that I didn’t know as much about the guys on the undercard as I do now.
That’s probably a factor of:
1. The PRIDE accuisition AND the downturn in the Japanese scene generally taking away an option.
2. The higher mass of fighters training generally (in no small part thanks to TUF… ugh…).
3. Advances in training techniques, methods for combing the different disciplines, and so on, that mean a fighter isn’t as completely out of his depth when he isn’t in his comfort zone.
…among other things.
"I'm AJB and I endorse this nut-puncher."
That's a tough 70 million dollar lesson to learn....
Damn! 70 Million, I didn’t know they spent that much.
I’ve heard people say it was way less (which would make sense) but I haven’t seen another number tossed out there yet.
Even at 30 million they still got hosed in the deal. Zuffa might be on top but it was DSE that got the last laugh.
It made the Zuffa the number one Fight Org in the world and actually brought together some pretty good fights. If Chuck vs Wandy didnt happen after they were both on consecutive losses, if shogun beat forrest, if Cro Cop didnt get his head kicked off by Gonzaga, and so on down the list, this deal would look alot better. Sometimes you have to eat a bit of money to bring down the only legit competition. I think it was worth it.
Zuffa and Pride didn’t compete in the same market so most of the people who watched the UFC didn’t know or care about what was going on in Japan. They could of gained the same number one fight org appearance with hardcore fans by just letting Pride go out of business. The Cro Cop fight with Gonzaga doesn’t have anything to do with this deal either as they had already signed Cro Cop before they bought Pride. Heck the other two fights you mentioned were about the extend of the “pretty good fights” you are talking about, other than a couple of Dan Henderson’s fights what other great fights have come out of the deal?
Nowhere near 70 million was spent.
They did pay the original down payment, but stopped future payments when issues arose with the due process as well as feeling that the remaining Pride employees were making no attempts to work with them.
I don’t know the total amount, but it is likely between 10-20% of that figure.
They did indeed get all of the Pride footage, they talked about it on the last Dana blog.
In hindsight, they should have simply waited for the company to collapse. They had already signed Nog and Mirko. Even if Pride stayed alive, Zuffa was in a position to pay more than them.
“They did pay the original down payment, but stopped future payments when issues arose with the due process as well as feeling that the remaining Pride employees were making no attempts to work with them.”
I know, hence the word “nearly” but Jesus Christ people, is there room for literary license? I didn’t go into the lawsuits either where the parties accused each other of a number of things including a lack of due diligence among others. Do I have to mention every angle of every story to do a post now? Yeesh.
As some people might remember, according to the official comic book, the $70 million figure (or 7,000,000,000 yen to be exact) was just for show and it was closer to $10 million plus the outstanding debts the company had.
Also:
This adventure was a Zuffa misstep, but they’ve clearly learned from it. And they’re better for it.
Yet another internet myth that needs to get exposed, Zuffa destoyed their only form of competition and showed that the Pride hype was just that and are now the unquestioned rulers of MMA that is no mistep that is great business.
That may be what ultimately happened (and some would disagree with that assessment), but it certainly wasn’t the course that ZUFFA charted. Let’s not give them so much credit that it looks like ZUFFA’s decisions were handed down by Nostradamus or carved into stone tablets.
"I'm AJB and I endorse this nut-puncher."
Pride and Zuffa didn’t even compete in the same market, they were only competition in terms of signing fighters and even then Pride was on the brink and Zuffa was signing away whomever they wanted already(Cro Cop and Big Nog both got UFC deals well before Zuffa bought Pride). Spending millions to kill off a already dead Japanese company for the sake of proving something to silly internet fans is a horrible business decision. They didn’t prove Pride was hype, hell Pride has as many hardcore fans now as when they were still in business. They didn’t prove themselves to b the unquestioned rulers of MMA with the Pride purchase they proved that when they walked in and signed Cro Cop and Big Nog away from Pride without Pride even being able to put up a fight. All of what you said could of been done by just letting Pride go out of business, it would of saved them millions and they still would of been able to sign whomever they wanted later (and probably could of picked up the video library too).
Ed Fishman was already pretty much out of the picture but there were rumors of Vince/Shane McMahon having an interest in Pride, the only thing from a business standpoint that would make sense is that they slammed the door on the WWE entering the MMA scene at that time. Of course that was only a rumor that they were interested so that’s a bit silly too.
I had a long rebuttal to this but someone more hardcore into MMA would probably do a better job. It’s pretty laughable to say that Pride has as many hardcore fans now as they did when they were in business though, unless you mean on a few English-language message boards. I wonder how Japanese or Korean MMA fans would feel about that statement.
Anyway Vince McMahon actually did meet with Pride officials. He was partly prompted by his son Shane, who is a huge MMA fan. Vince’s vision of MMA was far more on the theatrical side, even if they were to be real fights. One of the people he was most interested in Pride reportedly was Butterbean, because he felt he was extremely marketable. While mulling over the idea he even signed a few wrestlers with serious MMA experience (like Sylvester Terkay), presumably to switch over to his fledgling MMA league if that were to come into existence. In the end he came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth it, and things just ran their course.
In the US a few English-language websites/messageboards is the hardcore fans for the sport, the UFC is built on the casual fan not the hardcore fans. Pride really never had a big audience in the US to start with and that audience here has stayed pretty loyal. Heck by looking around the few “English-language messageboards” Pride might have a bigger US following based on nostalgia and Fedor. The common ground for the UFC vs Pride discussions was on a handful of “English-language messageboards” and that was the only place where there was any competition between the two that is why saying that the UFC killed Pride because they were their main competition is so silly, they weren’t direct competition for each other except in the eyes of hardcore internet fans.
It doesn’t matter about the Japanese or Korean fans for this specific point as they are a different market that the UFC still isn’t really in. The very fact that the two organizations were in drastically different markets with very little business overlap was the point I was making. Pride losing Japanese or Korean fans is totally irrelevant to any reason that the UFC would want to kill them off because that wasn’t a UFC audience in 2007 anyway(it’s not one now for that matter). Why in the world would the UFC want to kill off a foriegn market company in a market that they weren’t even involved in?
I know the story around the WWE’s interest in Pride but there never was anything more than a story, it’s not like the WWE put an actual offer in to buy Pride. The only possible business reason for the UFC to buy them first would be if the WWE was planning on buying Pride and moving them into the US market (the WWE hasn’t been able to run a promotion in Japan either, for the same reasons). If the WWE really wanted to jump into MMA in both feet they would of started their own MMA promotion not bought a Japanese one with very little US exposure. I’m sure the WWE would of loved to work with Pride but I doubt they wanted to own them and try to move them to the US market. That is the only business reason I can see for the UFC to buy Pride just to shut them down and that doesn’t make much sense either. The only reason to buy Pride that makes any business sense would be to try and get into the Japanese market not to shut the company down.
I mentioned Korean and Japanese fans because they made up the bulk of Pride’s fanbase internationally. You never specified “English-speaking” hardcore fans in your original post. Even among English-speaking fans there is far less chatter about Pride these days than back during their heyday on most of the boards I’ve seen, but that’s besides the point when they only made up only a small fraction of Pride’s fanbase.
As for the WWE, I never said that Vince McMahon made Pride a formal offer, but he legit met Pride officials and was considering either buying them or buying select assets. This was reported on extensively by Dave Meltzer in the Wrestling Observer newsletter (he has God-knows-how-many contacts in the WWE), among other wrestling journalists, it’s not merely some “rumor.”
Also, while the WWE hasn’t been able to run a separate promotion in Japan, they’ve had no trouble doing highly profitable live events there and getting on major television networks.
I thought it was understood when I was talking about the fact that they were in different markets that I was talking about fans in this market not Pride’s market, it was my mistake to assume that was understood in the answer(it was also a complete aside to what my actual point was not a point in and of itself). My whole entire statement was 100% about why it was stupid from a business standpoint for the UFC to buy Pride for the reason of killing them off like a lot of people seem to believe. The fact that as you said yourself English speaking fans only made up a small fraction of Pride’s fanbase illustrates that point. They were different companies in completly different markets on different sides of the globe, they weren’t competitiors with each other (Pride’s competitor was K-1 Heroes not the UFC). That is the big falacy here, that Pride and the UFC were business competitiors when really the only place where they directly competed was in fighter signings and internet messageboard conversations.
As far as less chatter on messageboards, of course there is less chatter there is very little Pride news to talk about but that doesn’t mean those people aren’t hardcore fans of Pride anymore it just means they are short on current topics. Still you mention Fedor on a messageboard and you will get an absolute deluge of replies and people still talk about the Pride replacement “Dream” all the time too.
Yes Meltzer said they had meetings with the WWE, Shane McMahon even put in an appearance at Pride 32 but that was all there was, DSE was shopping the company around and had a meeting with the WWE. The meeting was confirmed but anything beyond that was rumor. Why would the WWE want to buy a Japanese based promotion if they were thinking about starting a US based MMA promotion? The WWE has done one offs and tours in Japan but then it’s not like the UFC has never done a show in Japan for that point. Buying and running a Japanese MMA promotion is completely different than doing an occasional tour event there.
This will go down as the equivalent of the AFL/NFL merger when the history of MMA is written – when the sport grew up, got serious and put all its stars in the same place at the same time.
by Derek Suboticki on Mar 27, 2009 3:39 PM EDT reply actions
more like the AAFC dissolving into the NFL (3 teams, Colts, Browns, Niners)…
MMA can become so huge, the UFC buying Pride is nowhere close to the AFL/NFL merger, I don’t believe we’ve seen that merger yet but I think sometime in the next 5 years we definitely will…and i think it’ll be an actual merger, not a buyout.
oh and the fact that AFL/NFL merger got ALL the best players and teams into one league…
UFC buying PRIDE didn’t do that, though I wish it did and still wish all the best were in one org…
UFC buying PRIDE led to them snatching the stars they wanted (Silva, Nogueira, Henderson, Shogun) and allowed them to stage more shows with big main events. So yeah, the AFL/NFL analogy is a bit much.
The sport grew up sometime early in this decade – TUF newbs like subo just weren’t around to get the memo. And as we’ve seen in the last year or so, UFC’s continued success on PPV hasn’t led to them cornerning the market on stars – if anything, the free agent market in MMA is bigger and better than it has ever been.
The PRIDE buyout won’t be remembered as an adventure or a learning experience for the UFC – the real memorable part was the empty promises, and the subsequent excuse making about why they couldn’t deliver on them.
I wouldn’t call them empty promises and subsequent excuses as much as UFC bosses were too stupid to know that Japan was a closed shop when they made the purchase. I think they truly thought they could buy Pride and waltz in, get a new tv deal and set up shop which was pure fantasy (although the DSE guys probably painted a rosey picture for them). Pride was more dead in Japan owned by an outsider than when it was tied to the yakuza.
Ed Fishman was very interested in Pride, until he did his due diligence of the company then he changed his mind. Zuffa apparently wasn’t so smart.
When asked about the rumored price tag, Fishman suggested it was similar to what he offered for control of PRIDE. The casino entrepreneur also expressed that after doing his due diligence, he is no longer interested in purchasing the organization that currently houses Fedor Emelianenko
They didn’t get the whole tape library, Fuji Tv still owns most of it, that’s why thier highlights from Pride fights are so repetetive.
Not only that, but FSN and The Fight Network have the right to re-broadcast any PRIDE content they’ve aired over the years. The UFC basically paid millions for the non-exclusive rights to some of the library.
That’s what I thought. So lets look at what Zuffa actually got:
1. Dan Henderson (the only fighter that I know of who’s contract actually transfered over).
2. Non-exclusive rights to a partial video library.
3. The Pride brand name that is all but worthless now in the US and in Japan.
4. An office full of Pride employees that didn’t want to do squat to help Zuffa.
5. Lots of legal trouble.
Did I miss anything?
A bad rap for screwing over guys like Mark Hunt and Joachim Hansen by purchasing their contracts and then refusing to let them fight for the agreed upon amounts. Instead they tried to force those guys (and others possibly) to accept new contracts with slashed purse figures.
Like Afflction and Strikeforce?
Hansen asked for his release and got it.
Whether or not it is fair to ask a fighter to redo his contract is up for debate, but both Afflction and Strikeforce are currently doing it.
Regarding the Pride library: Others have the right to use the footage, but Zuffa owns the master tapes and rights for future usage. I am sure Fuji has copies (and the right air) any bouts that were broadcast, but they don’t have the right to sell that footage to other companies.
Were that the case, Affliction would have contacted Fuji or FSN to use the footage of Barnett, Fedor and others.
For example: Any future DVDs would come from Zuffa.
No, not like Strikeforce. They are trying to get fighters like Carano to fight for the previously agreed upon amount. Gina, in turn, is probably asking for a new contract for more money, or a lucrative extension. As far as Affliction goes, all I hear are rumours, I don’t know what specifically they’re asking of the fighters.
Hansen got jerked around for quite a while before he was finally clear from UFC, by the way.
Strikeforce has approached some fighters (Kimbo, for one) about fighting for less. Ninja was another. His contract was ultimately not picked up because he would not sign a new deal.
In regards to Afflction, multiple sites have stated they have heard from both fighters as well as managers regarding reworked contracts.
If memory serves, Hansen had to wait about two months to get his release. They did negotiate for a few months, then he asked to be released in late summer/early Fall. He was released on October and fought for Shooto in November.
The former Pride folks made Barnett sit on his hands until the contract expired. He ended up not fighting for almost a year after Pride died because he was locked up under contract with the former owners.
Also all the internet fanboys bitching and moaning about how the evil empire killed PrideFC.
A man should never waste an opportunity to keep his mouth shut.
Yes that is very annoying too but I think it bothers me more than it bothers Zuffa. All in all I see this more as Zuffa’s big bungle instead of the revenge of the evil empire. Pride might of pulled of another couple of shows but for all practical purposes they were dead already. Buying Pride just to kill it would be like shooting a terminal cancer patient with a (30 to) 70 million dollar gun, what’s the point.
you guys got a linkable source to this stuff?
"the spirit of your average dumbass with more overblown rhetoric" OR "the self-appointed savior of MMA"
I have heard that about the FSN issue multiple times but I bet it’s the kind of contract information your just not going to get on the record from Fox or Zuffa and you will never get out of a Japanese company. Whatever is actually going on FSN still airs Pride fights all the time, the UFC only occasionally shows small clips and they never show Pride fights on Spike (which would make sense to pad out Unleashed if they had tv rights to show them).
so how do you know this?
"the spirit of your average dumbass with more overblown rhetoric" OR "the self-appointed savior of MMA"
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