The UFC has lost its perpetual battle against its stars.
It didn’t lose the battle in a day. There wasn’t a single defining moment that marked the transition from a promotion focused above all on its brand to one that recognized that the public bought into stars, not those three all-important letters.
To be sure, the UFC still does things that prioritize the brand as a whole over individual fighters, and it may not even be fully aware of how much leverage it has lost in the last several years. Still, the momentum has undeniably shifted.
How can we tell? Have things really changed that much?
There are two clear indicators. The first, whether you love them or hate them, is the rise of Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey.
Their drawing power is so far beyond that of any other fighters in the UFC that they belong in their own category: Events that the two headlined combined to sell 4.625 million pay-per-views in 2015, out of a total of 7.55 million, according to buyrates listed at MMAPayout, collated from Dave Meltzer of Wrestling Observer Newsletter.
Their five events sold more than 60 percent of the total pay-per-view units that year. Only UFC 182, which featured a grudge match between Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier, and UFC 183, with the superfight between the returning Anderson Silva and fan favorite Nick Diaz, surpassed Rousey‘s lowest-selling offering. UFC 184, featuring Rousey and Cat Zingano at the top, was an abysmal card. It still sold 600,000 units.
If you expand the Rousey-McGregor duo to a trio that includes the wayward Jones, the three stars accounted for 70 percent of the UFC’s buys in 2015.
UFC 196 firmly cemented that trend. On an interview with ESPN Radio‘s Max and Marcellus, UFC President Dana White called it the biggest show the promotion had ever done and estimated its buyrate at 1.5 million.
Rousey and McGregor didn’t become huge draws by pure chance. They’re compelling and charismatic, to be sure, but the UFC also invested a tremendous amount of time and resources into placing them in front of as many eyeballs as possible through a coherent and in-depth public relations strategy.
The UFC placed Rousey and McGregor on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. In-depth profiles appeared in Esquire and Rolling Stone. The mainstream audiences that these shows and publications reach are orders of magnitude larger than what is usually available to fighters.
These kinds of appearances don’t happen by accident; professionals working on behalf of clients have to reach out and make those arrangements, and the UFC made that effort for Rousey and McGregor.
While Rousey has yet to buck the UFC publicly, the promotion inadvertently created a monster with McGregor.
The Irishman began pushing out on his own as soon as he had won the featherweight title. He has proved to be a tough negotiator, and the new contract he signed just prior to UFC 194 last December is reportedly the richest in UFC history, worth somewhere north of $16 million per fight, according to former Bleacher Report writer Jeremy Botter on Off the Ball. In sum, the deal should be worth nine figures, McGregor told MMAFighting.com’s Ariel Helwani at the time.
The fact that McGregor has been so vocal about his value to the promotion has triggered a cascading effect. Perhaps it would have happened without him, but there has been a sea change in fighters’ attitudes toward discussing money and free agency.
That’s the second major factor in this new state of affairs. For a long time, the prevailing attitude seemed to be that the UFC would take care of its own. More and more fighters have realized that’s not the case.
Longtime UFC heavyweight and recent Bellator signee Matt Mitrione summed it up in an interview with MMA Junkie’s Ben Fowlkes. “I saved the card doing that [taking a short-notice fight against Roy Nelson], and I just felt like, afterward, it was like, ‘Well, you lost and now you don’t mean (expletive).’ I just noticed, look how fast the tide turned. Look how fickle that is—and after I was doing them a favor.”
Fighting is a business, and fighters have to look out for themselves.
The recent emphasis on free agency, of which Mitrione‘s signing with Bellator is just one example, showcases this shift. Former UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson likewise signed with Bellator in February. Daniel Cormier didn’t test free agency, but he did sign a lucrative new deal in November.
Even UFC stalwart Rory MacDonald will test the market once his contract is up this summer. “I’ve sacrificed a lot to get to the top, to the world title,” he told Helwani in March (via MMAFighting.com). “I really sacrificed, and I took a lot of chances. I did a lot of favors, I felt like, for the UFC and I don’t think it got returned. So now it’s all about making money, and whoever wants to pay me the most is where I’ll go.”
Nobody encapsulates that change better than rising bantamweight and budding star Aljamain Sterling, who went through a highly publicized free-agent process earlier this year.
The New Yorker used that process to build his brand, explaining his process to the media, making podcast appearances to discuss fighter pay and Reebok and finally announcing his decision live on The MMA Hour.
Sterling leveraged the media and these shifts in attitude to both increase his profile and get a better deal than he otherwise would have received. While he may not reach the heights of McGregor and Rousey—it would be completely unreasonable to use them as a measuring stick—Sterling played the game well and positioned himself as someone who has a good chance of turning into a star in the future.
The 26-year-old bantamweight won’t be the last fighter to play the market and see what he’s worth.
To be perfectly clear, most of the leverage still lies with the UFC. It’s the biggest organization by any measure, with the most money, the best-known brand and the deepest reach both in the United States and the world. Still, that doesn’t mean that fighters have no room to push back, and what we’re seeing is a slight but still meaningful shift in the relationship between the UFC and its fighters.
The UFC is an opaque organization, and it’s hard to prove the existence of a shift in its thinking. The approach to Rousey and McGregor, however, and White’s increasingly sparse profile as a frontman, suggests that the UFC might finally embracing its stars.
The pay-per-view numbers couldn’t be clearer: Fans buy stars, not the UFC brand. The UFC might have to give up some money and leverage, but the massive numbers it draws in return more than make up for the increases in pay it is forced to hand over.
Fight promotion isn’t a zero-sum game, where the UFC loses whatever it gives to the fighters. Focusing on stars grows the entire pie.
That’s a special thing when it happens.
Patrick Wyman is the Senior MMA Analyst for Bleacher Report and the co-host of the Heavy Hands Podcast—your source for the finer points of face-punching. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.
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