UFC's Refusal to Co-Promote Events Isn't Just About Their Dominance

Yeah, well… it was brought up in the conference call. Even though I knew about this stipulation, I never once thought of it until I started hearing what M-1’s ultimate intention was in a co-promotional effort. Now, it’s pretty clear.

I don’t know if it’s an impossibility, but it brings up heavy possibilities of scrutiny from the Gaming Commission in Vegas. Any deal like this would, and it being an international deal probably brings some scrutiny. Zuffa probably doesn’t want to have another PRIDE matter in which the due diligence done was obviously not enough. They risked basically telling a judge that they did a shitty job of due diligence in the matter in order to get money out of DSE.

i wanna be retired, and watch his kids beat the hell of out everyone.

Well, it wasn’t that. It’s just that if a co-promotion were to happen, the possibility of all of these things happening could potentially happen. Obviously, the UFC is very, very hesitant to enter into any dealings that would involve another organization being under contract in a co-promotional effort because then due diligence would have to be involved in that deal. The NGC could probably take some interest if they believe some wrongdoing is going on, or the OTHER organization involved in the deal is corrupt. Hence why due diligence is done to find out if that’s a possibility. The problem is… as exposed by the PRIDE lawsuit, it’s tough to do due diligence.

Another way of looking at it of course, is that while Brock-headlined PPVs might average 1 million buys, Brock-Fedor hits 1.5. Those 500K incremental buys, at $25 a buy, is worth $12.5 million to the company. If M-1 is kicking in $2 or 3 million to cover the cost of staging the PPV, the UFC gains (if they generate $37.5 million off of a $2 or $3 million investment) a $15.75-16.75 million profit, rather than $25 million off a $5 or 6 million investment., or a $19-20 million profit.

To me, even if UFC were planning to co-promote, they’d want to do just as well, if not better than they’d do for any other Brock Lesnar fight. 60-40, or 65-35, might adjust their profit margins to something more amenable.

But alas, this is the kind of analysis that I hope the good people at Strikeforce and Showtime will be engaging in going forward.

Obviously, but this is another point to be made.

I am, but I don’t work here =(

Sign me up!

Problem with that, is that the UFC already does 90% of the work by just attaching their brand.

What? Honestly who is co-promoting? Strikeforce only co-promoted with EliteXC because of a court settlement (because of Frank Shamrock’s contract) and the thing they did with Affliction was just them allowing Affliction to pay AA to fight on a Strikeforce card against a Strikeforce fighter, that wasn’t a co-promotion that was basically buying advertising in the middle of the Strikeforce card(same with AA on the CBS card). When you get down to it Strikeforce is willing to move fighters around but they aren’t actually co-promoting either. Bellator isn’t co-promoting? When had WVR co-promoted? The only time I can think of K-1 doing an actual co-promotion was Dynamite!! USA in 2007(pre-Dream) and they haven’t been back since. Bodog co-promoted one PPV with M-1 and it pretty much killed them off as a company. The only people who have been doing this co-promotion on a regular basis is Affliction and M-1 and we can see how that ended up. The big hypocrisy here is fans who pretend that this is something that actually commonplace and successful in the sport instead of looking at how things actually are.

As far as getting to see the best fighters against each other, we don’t need co-promotion because we get that darn near every month out of the UFC, they hold close to 70% of the best fighters in the world and the only true world champion they are missing is Fedor.