Tell someone on the street that you follow MMA and they’ll look at you in confusion. Tell someone on the street that you follow the UFC and they’ll immediately understand. All MMA fans have experienced this phenomenon and it illustrates one important point: The UFC brand name is stronger than the sport itself.
How did this happen?
The UFC has grown by leaps and bounds since its start in 1993. As the first organization of its kind in the ’90s, fans really didn’t know what to call what was going on inside the cage aside from a name reflecting the promotion’s name. There was no such thing as “mixed martial arts” in the beginning since not a lot of fighters mixed martial arts.
People, ignorant of the martial arts world, instead just saw mixed rules fights and called it “ultimate fighting” or “cage fighting.” Many people still use those terms today.
Aside from semantics, the fact that the UFC was the “original,” and therefore the most famous and recognizable brand in the sea of MMA promotions, was crucial in forming the brand’s strength in the United States. Most people hadn’t heard of Extreme Fighting or Martial Arts Reality Superfighting (MARS) but they had heard of the UFC.
Once Zuffa purchased the company in 2001, the practice of strengthening the UFC brand (especially via merchandising) was taken to new heights. The UFC and the UFC’s brand strength soared for the next 10 years. The UFC eclipsed MMA just as Kleenex eclipsed tissue or Band-aid eclipsed adhesive strip.
Just recently, the organization has signed a historic deal with FOX that will feature UFC programming on a major network for the very first time.
Critics of the UFC have maintained that calling MMA the “fastest growing sport in the world” is factually wrong; according to them the growth is only by one organization—the UFC.
While much of the growth has been by the UFC (and this is proven by the fact that “MMA” isn’t widely known—except among educated types who think of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—but UFC is), MMA itself has grown significantly and will continue to grow alongside the UFC.
Five years ago organizations like Bellator Fighting Championships, Shark Fights and Tachi Palace fights couldn’t exist. Now, thanks to the fact that the UFC has expanded the popularity of MMA in the United States (meaning that there are more MMA gyms and fighters), these promotions can thrive.
This process that has happened in the United States can and will happen to the countries that the UFC is expanding to. Did a significant portion of the populations in the UK or Germany know about MMA or train in it? Thanks to the UFC, the MMA scenes in these countries are expanding.
Even Sweden, who has no significant martial arts heritage like the U.S. has wrestling or Japan has Judo, has a sizable MMA promotion in the Superior Challenge organization.
Just observe the adjacent Superior Challenge video. It features fighters Jeremy Horn and Thales Leites, two fighters whose names were made by the UFC. The competition in the UFC grew too great for both men, but they were able to go and provide a good fight for a smaller promotion and therefore help build MMA.
Poland, too, has its MMA with KSW (or Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki, if you must know the full Polish name). These are but two of the MMA promotions whose existence was made possible by the UFC planting the MMA seed; there are many more that are far too numerous to list.
Even the MMA media has changed. Years ago, articles such as Jonathan Shrager’s “10 Reasons Why BAMMA Could, and Should, Be on Spike TV” probably wouldn’t have been written; why write an article about a “minor league” promotion when people wouldn’t read it because it wasn’t about the UFC?
However, thanks to the UFC’s growth, even promotions that are minor when compared to the UFC are more well-known they would’ve been before.
The UFC may be growing faster than MMA, but that doesn’t mean MMA won’t reach astounding heights as well. As the UFC becomes truly international in scope, it will have to host more and more shows across the globe each year.
Due to this fact, the largest promotions in each nation will fill the void in the UFC’s absence. These promotions will become large enough to be well-known, but small enough to never threaten the UFC’s hegemony.
The UFC is thus the great redwood whose saplings (Superior Challenge, KSW, BAMMA and others) have populated the landscape, but will never top the original; MMA is the UFC, not the other way around.
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