Sports Business Daily has broken some epic news regarding the UFC and Fox.
The two parties have agreed to a deal that says that the UFC will air up to four events per year on the major network.
The details of the deal should be very enticing for the vast majority of fight fans, with the main points being as follows:
This is believed to be a seven- or eight-year deal with bidding have reached up to $90 million per year.
Programs featured on Spike and Versus, like The Ultimate Fighter and UFC Live, will now be featured on the FX network.
UFC programming will also now make its way onto the Fox-owned Fuel network; however, Fuel has no plans of becoming a UFC channel.
This deal “would have included NBC and Versus and would have seen G4 re-branded as a UFC channel, but those talks recently broke down.”
The SBD article also mentions that the Versus and Spike TV deals with the UFC expire at the end of 2011 and that a deal with Comcast/NBC at one point looked very possible. The UFC also expressed an interest with renewing their deal with Spike, but the MTV subsidiary stated that they had no interest in making a new deal.
In 2005, Spike noted that UFC programs such as Unleashed, Knockouts and Countdown averaged about one million viewers.
This year, those shows are averaging less than half of that—around 492,000 viewers per show.
An interesting note is that “Spike holds the rights to UFC library programming through ’12, including old fights and shoulder programming such as UFC Unleashed.”
Both Fox and the UFC have refused to officially comment on the deal just yet, but multiple sources are reporting that the negotiation is in the record books.
Should things move forward as planned, this move will be huge in making MMA a more of mainstream sport.
UPDATE: 4:33 Eastern Time
UFC president Dana White is telling MMA Junkie that the deal has not yet been finalized.
“We’ve been very smart, and we’ve taken our time and built this thing slowly, just like you do any other business,” he said. “No matter what carrots were dangling out there in front of us, we know we’re in this thing for the long haul.
“We’re not in this thing to make money and everything else. We’re in this for the long haul. We got into this because we love this sport. We’re passionate about it, and what we want to do is build a sport.
“To me, building a sport is where everybody all over the world plays by the same rules. That’s our goal. That’s what we’re working on, and when the right deal comes, we’ll take it.”
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