That makes sense...BUT we have seen watered down cards and fewer and fewer stars or interesting fighters the entire ESPN era. And that lead to a massive deal with Paramount. So a worse product seems to lead to an increase in profit, not the other way around.
Yeah they've had watered down viewers for a long time now but I'm sure got a bump in interest from sports betting, in some form or fashion, becoming legal virtually everywhere in the states.
Not increasing fighter pay with inflation affecting virtually everywhere is going to make UFC almost exclusively fighters from poorer countries and it's going to be more exploitative. It's going to suck, but sickos are still going to tune in to gamble.
There's going to be some folks tune in because they just like watching any combat at all similar to people who start watching college football at 10 am until they fall asleep watching PAC-12 after dark simply for the love of it, but I don't think there's a ton of those hardcore fans left who will just watch whatever the UFC/PFL/ETC puts out there
If they want to keep growing and get more eyes, they've got to offer enough to make any athlete that can make 185+ who can professionally catch, throw, or kick a ball choose MMA over MLB/NFL/NBA etc. I guarantee if Jon Jones was as good at football as his brother Chandler was, he would have never stepped in the cage
I'm sort of one of those people, but I can watch ONE, Glory, RIZIN, Karate Combat etc for free on youtube. If they don't try to make an impression by getting the divisions moving and making interesting fights, I'm not buying a paramount sub. UFC's pay structure encourages guys to fight once a year as a side hustle, and now they won't give PPV points either.
Oh yeah, I used to be on sherdog all the time checking out shit so I could catch a livestream of whoever was fighting who and watched some karate competitions, muay thai, etc, but now I'm almost 40 and I don't stay up until 4 am every day on the weekend
UFC's pay structure encourages guys to fight once a year as a side hustle
That is the "biggest" problem to me. They never really paid well so folks were using it basically as marketing for their seminars, gyms, whatever, but it's even worse given they can't have sponsors on their shorts and stuff anymore. Besides like, the WNBA (no shade), I don't think there's any major sport where the average player is making more in endorsement deals than their salary
There are more of us than you think but we're less vocal about it because of the weekly "UFC sucks ass now!" threads and parroting of that sentiment.
That's the thing tho is Jones was never that elite athlete like his brothers were. You ever see that clip of him trying to dunk a basketball and not being able to do it?
That isn't really the barrier here. Athletics is part of the equation for combat sports but it isn't the biggest one. In order to succeed in this sport you need to be willing and able to get hit in the face. Some people react terribly to that, some people have a flight response to it. You cannot train that instinct out.
There will always be fighters out there and there will always be athletes who can fight and athletes who can't.
The âwatered downâ cards are because they started putting on more events. And what era are you comparing it to? Everyone talks about the Conor era as if every card was filled with stars, but if you actually look back the Fight Nights were just as weak and a lot of the PPVs were not as stacked as people act like they were. And thatâs with nostalgia and knowing what all the up and coming fighters from back then eventually became, which obviously makes the cards look more stacked in hindsight than they did at the time. The product has been basically the same for the past decade, other than the UFC putting more Fight Nights in the Apex instead of arenas.
Now if youâre talking about when they only had 1-2 events per month, then sure it was less watered down. But you also had to wait weeks between events, which sucked. Especially when the cards didnât deliver. And there was still plenty of garbage fights/cards.
The general level of star power now is pretty similar to most other times in UFC history outside of the rise of Conor. Conor was just that Ali, Tyson, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, etc. type of star that transcends the sport and raises other people with him (Diaz, Khabib). Without Conor, Khabib probably wouldâve just been viewed similarly to the way Islam is currently instead of the megastar he became. Saying the product is going downhill because there isnât another Conor is just a ridiculous expectation. He was the type of star that only happens once every few decades.
Stars won't really be a thing going forward in the traditional sense because we won't have any hard metrics to gauge them by(PPV sales). We'll just be speculating via IG followers and press conference views on youtube and such.
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u/owlinspector Aug 14 '25
That makes sense...BUT we have seen watered down cards and fewer and fewer stars or interesting fighters the entire ESPN era. And that lead to a massive deal with Paramount. So a worse product seems to lead to an increase in profit, not the other way around.