This BE Fanpost by malito3og3 was the first time I'd even registered that every fight on the main UFC 117 card features a Brazilian fighter vs an American.
Like most American fans I just sort of assume American predominance on UFC cards and have very little interest in nationalist rah rah stuff. I tend to root for the foreign fighter if anything just because yahoos chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" strikes me as being a poor host to international fighters.
But in Brazil, it's a very different manner. I know there were complaints about UFC 104 and UFC 113 featuring two Brazilians in the title fight. That struck me as kind of crazy at the time, but I talked to a couple of Brazilian fans who explained that they saw that as a way of pitting the Brazilian fighters against each other to the detriment of the cause of Brazililan fighters vis a vis American fighters.
The UFC apparently listened to those complaints because this card didn't just put itself together by accident. And that's a smart play.
Zuffa makes no secret of their very serious commitment to international expansion. They model their business on the WWE and they saw how the European market proved a very profitable safe haven for the McMahons as their U.S. business eroded over the last decade.
And Brazil is a very very rich target for MMA. Brazil has traditionally been a fairly poor country, but their economy has been growing rapidly over the past decade and with its huge population that means they're very nearly reaching the critical mass of middle class people necessary to afford an expensive hobby like following the UFC. They're also a HUGE country with over 192 million people.
Ironically since Brazil produces more top level MMA athletes than any country but the U.S. and did as much to birth the sport as any country including the U.S. and Japan, MMA has never been a popular spectator sport in Brazil. Despite the occasional big event featuring the Gracies fighting over the decades, vale tudo fights have been more spectacle than sport marred by ugly feuds and stupid outbreaks of violence.
Only in the last decade with the development of lucrative international markets in Japan and the U.S. that Brazilian fighters finally stop their incessant inter-camp feuding and realize they could really grow something by working together.
The UFC did some serious promotion for UFC 104 in Brazil featuring Lyoto Machida and Shogun Rua and I'm told it was one of the first times that MMA was treated as a serious sport in that country. If UFC 113 got similar treatment I missed it, but perhaps that is because they had already hit upon the Brazil vs the U.S.A. angle for UFC 117 and are saving their chits to push this card.
This card should play very very well in Brazil indeed:
Anderson Silva (26-4) vs. Chael Sonnen (24-10-1)
Ricardo Almeida (12-3) vs Matt Hughes (44-7)
Thiago Alves (16-6) vs. Jon Fitch (22-3)
Junior dos Santos (11-1) vs. Roy Nelson (15-4)
Rafael dos Anjos (14-4) vs. Clay Guida (26-11)
Thiago Silva (14-2) vs. Tim Boetsch (11-3)
One of the beauties about marketing this card as a battle of nations is that every fight should be competitive and most could easily go either way -- even better, the prohibitive favorites are both Brazilian (A. Silva and T. Silva), thereby bettering the chances that the Brazilian market will have something to cheer about at the end of the night.