Since Bellator Fighting Championships was created, there hasn’t been much vitriol between them and the UFC, which happens to be the biggest MMA promotion on the planet.
Certainly there have been jabs back and forth, here and there over the years, but not until Bellator signed on to replace the UFC on Spike TV did the gloves come off a bit more.
In addition to airing on Spike TV, Bellator is now owned by Viacom—the parent company of Spike TV which televised the UFC for several years including during the launch of The Ultimate Fighter in 2005.
Since the split with their former network home, UFC president Dana White has made no secret that he’s not a fan of Viacom or their business practices. When the announcement was made that Bellator was going into the pay-per-view business this November, White went on a tirade proclaiming “they have no f—king clue what they’re doing.”
Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney disagrees with White’s assessment of the company’s move into the pay-per-view market. He even took a back-handed slap at the UFC’s willingness to put on a pay-per-view card every single month, regardless of who is fighting on the card.
While he never said the UFC by name, it was pretty clear who Rebney was talking about when he discussed Bellator‘s future plans for pay-per-view during a press conference on Monday.
“The one thing that I’ve always said about pay-per-view is that you can’t force feed pay-per-views down people’s throats month in and month out. You can’t do it as a repetitive vehicle,” Rebney stated.
“We’re a free TV mechanism and a free TV business. Our partnership and our alliance is with Spike, and when incredible opportunities come up for us, and I sit down with our partners and we have the opportunity to Tito (Ortiz) vs. Rampage (Jackson) or we have the opportunity to another huge fight that as an MMA fan you go ‘that’s great, I would watch that’ we will probably jump back into the pay-per-view arena.
“It’s not going to be one of those things where every single month, do or die, we keep putting it out same time, same place, same channel, where we don’t necessarily have or someone else doesn’t necessarily have the fighters to fuel it that a premium purchase should be fueled. We’ll be back in it, but we’ll be back in it when the time’s right to be back in it.”
The question then came up to Rebney about the main event that will lead Bellator‘s first foray into pay-per-view pitting two former UFC champions against each other. Both Tito Ortiz and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson are coming off multiple losses in a row, but are viewed as big names and legends in MMA.
Just having a legendary name doesn’t mean Bellator is planning to forgo its current system of crowning contenders. Since its inception, Bellator has depended on the tournament format to hand out titles as well as find contenders in each weight class.
Rebney says that standard won’t change just because Bellator is putting on a big fight between two well-known names like Jackson and Ortiz. He says in Bellator, fighters have to earn their shot at the belt.
This is when Rebney took another crack at the UFC, again without ever saying a name, but obviously talking about current UFC light heavyweight Chael Sonnen. Sonnen received a title shot at 205 pounds despite coming off a loss in a middleweight title bout in his last trip to the Octagon. Sonnen is known as a prolific talker, and apparently Rebney isn’t a fan of how he got his shot at the belt.
“Our point of difference is that we’re real sports competition, and when it boils down to world title fights, when it boils down to crowning our champion at 170, or 55 or 45 or whatever weight class, guys are going to earn the right to fight for that championship and they’re going to have to beat the champion. It’s the toughest tournament in sports, it’s real sports competition,” Rebney said. “We’re not sitting around waiting for some wrestler to lose two fights straight and then bark his way into a 205 world title fight. That’s just not the essence of what we do.”
During the entire press conference, Rebney rarely if ever even uttered the words UFC, and never mentioned any fighter or executive by name, but reading between the lines it was pretty transparent who he was speaking about on both accounts.
While there’s no doubt the UFC will likely always be the No. 1 MMA promotion, Bellator certainly seems willing to poke at the bear with some of the comments he has made lately.
Whether it gets a reaction from the UFC, or if they even care, remains to be seen.
Damon Martin is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report and all quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com