Fans of combat sports were treated to a memorable evening on Saturday night as Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Miguel Cotto battled it out on pay-per-view following an entertaining fight card put on by the UFC on FOX.
The ratings aren’t in quite yet for these events, but judging by trends on both Google and Twitter, it’s safe to assume that the Mayweather-Cotto event profited a huge number while UFC likely lagged behind the results that it pulled in from the first two events on FOX.
The night proved that while the UFC may be the fastest growing, boxing is still the king of combat all sports…
For now.
There is absolutely no denying that Floyd Mayweather is the biggest draw in fighting today. His pay-per-view buy numbers are astounding. His rival, Manny Pacquiao, trails behind him but is still by far and away the second-biggest draw.
But after that, it’s anyone’s guess.
It has been nearly eight years since the last time that a pay-per-view event headlined by someone other than Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao reached a million buys, when Oscar De La Hoya battled Bernard Hopkins.
Pacquiao and Mayweather crack the one million buy mark with ease in every fight they have, but aside from those two marquee fighters, the sport of boxing and its influence on the mainstream sports world is on life support.
If you take Pacquiao and Mayweather out of the equation, boxing only had two events in 2011 which reached even 100,000 pay-per-view buys. In contrast, the UFC easily surpassed 100,000 buys for every event they put on in 2011.
As Mayweather and Pacquiao near the end of their careers, the UFC must be salivating at the possibility of finally being the pinnacle of combat sports. Who knows exactly how long boxing’s stars will stick around, but with no one waiting in the wings to take their place, boxing could be in for some serious dark days as the UFC pulls ahead, perhaps for the long haul.
While the UFC did lose its own biggest pay-per-view buy generator in Brock Lesnar, the growth in the popularity of stars such as Jon Jones and Junior dos Santos could help make up for that. However, the biggest reason for the company’s success on pay-per-view has been its business model.
Unlike boxing, the UFC brands itself, not the fighters.
Sure, they create stars in the process, but the focus is always on the UFC brand itself. If a main event fight gets canceled, the card isn’t scrapped—they just replace it with another fight and fans eat it up. We simply can’t get enough. That cannot and does not happen in the boxing world.
If the sport of boxing doesn’t drastically change its model, we could be talking about it in the past tense. As in, “remember when we used to watch boxing?”
We might already be past the point of no return…and the UFC is ready to fill the void.
For more MMA news, fighter interviews and opinions, follow Nick Caron: @NicholasCaron.
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