Women fight just as hard as men, if not harder. They deserve a place in the UFC, they deserve a place alongside Georges St.Pierre and Anderson Silva.
Detractors of women’s MMA (hereafter abbreviated as WMMA) would deny this and say that WMMA doesn’t belong in the UFC. Some would even say that it shouldn’t exist at all!
But there are several reasons why the UFC should seriously consider adding women’s divisions to the UFC.
First, women’s fights are entertaining. They are often the most fun to watch on the card because the women feel a constant need to prove themselves just as good as the men; they feel the need to prove that comparing WMMA with the “boring” WNBA is misguided.
Adding two women’s divisions—women’s featherweight and women’s bantamweight—would also give the UFC two more titles to place on the card, bringing the total to 10 titles (when you include the newly announced flyweight division).
The UFC is one of the fastest growing sports entities in the world and two more legitimate titles will help bolster cards that would otherwise be weak. There will be cards that WMMA can help since Dana White once said he plans to hold 100 events a year.
Adding women to the UFC would also give the UFC a unique (for them) marketing angle: Sex appeal.
One of the (sad) truths of WMMA is that looks matter—a lot. The rule that sex sells applies to WMMA just as it does to the music industry or any other industry based around celebrity culture.
No offense to Junior Dos Santos, but the young male demographic doesn’t want a poster of him on their walls.
The WMMA world had Gina Carano and is now is having more stars come out of the woodwork with Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate.
As Rousey and Tate become more popular and grow the sport, more women will get involved and there will be more stars to help the UFC and WMMA climb to new heights.
Furthermore, adding women to the UFC would make the UFC appear to be the most progressive of all the major sports organizations. It would give the UFC moral high ground over organizations like the NFL and show that the UFC truly is the sports company of the future.
All of these reasons would mean that the UFC would be in a good position for future growth.
WMMA would draw more women into the sport and, in doing so, captivate a whole bloc of society. Over the course of a generation, millions of households will have been raised on the UFC product and it will surge in popularity even more than it has since 1993.
Bringing women into the sport would be a tremendous boon to long-term growth, although maybe an inhibitor in the short term due to narrow-minded individuals who loathe the sport and don’t view women as equals.
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