Rory MacDonald has gone to Bellator.
Tom Wright got axed.
Georges St-Pierre might never have an organized fight outside of a courtroom again.
Canadian fans are outright boycotting an event in the nation’s biggest city.
It is a dark time for the UFC in Canada, and it’s been a long time coming. There have been times over the course of the past few years when things have gotten rocky or when big promises have been broken, but it finally seems to have gone past the point of no return.
This week will go down as one of the bleakest in the history of the promotion’s efforts north of border, as new owner WME-IMG trimmed the UFC’s Canadian office while simultaneously waging contractual war with the biggest MMA star the country has ever produced. Perhaps inconveniently, tickets for UFC 206, which is the first major event in Canada since 2014, went on sale around the same time.
The results were predictably mixed.
The path the UFC has taken in Canada is a cautionary tale for any business that fancies global domination. While the promotion has also canned executives and closed offices in other major hubs, not that long ago, it was Canada that was set to carry the UFC into its next golden age.
President Dana White called it the “mecca of MMA” on more than one occasion.
The biggest crowd in the history of the sport filled Rogers Centre in 2011, a record that stood until last year.
Tickets went as fast to see non-regional stars such as Chuck Liddell and Shogun Rua as they did to see St-Pierre or MacDonald.
And now it’s all gone.
As the UFC aggressively watered down its product in 2012, Canada was arguably hit the hardest. UFC 149, held in Calgary, is legendary for its paltriness. UFC 152 in Toronto was only good because of Jon Jones’ unwillingness to bow to his corporate masters.
UFC 154 and 158 were honest attempts to do right by Canadian fans, buoyed by a St-Pierre return versus Carlos Condit and then a title defense against his greatest foil, Nick Diaz. But after that, things went off the rails.
Meaningless events such as Dan Henderson fighting Rashad Evans, Jon Jones defending against Alex Gustafsson (which was irrelevant right up until Gustafsson fought the fight of his life) and Demetrious Johnson defending his title became the norm for pay-per-views on Canadian soil.
The UFC then further strategized its Canadian market expansion by hitting regions of the country with smaller shows in smaller places, mostly with uninspired results and response. Places such as Halifax, Quebec City and Saskatoon began to book events, with the biggest name to ever appear on one surely being middleweight champion Michael Bisping.
It was a gamble, one that centered on the longstanding notion that fans were loyal to the brand and not to its stars or, increasingly, the quality of a card.
It didn’t pay off.
The Canadian market responded by making the UFC an afterthought, much like the way the promotion had treated Canada as it attempted to expand into other areas of the globe. The result is what came to a head this week, with whatever breath left in the proverbial lungs of this dying market colored with passionate negativity.
It’s tough to say exactly how to weigh the confluence of events that has largely killed the UFC in Canada. Carelessness from the promotion obviously deserves attention, but a bad, confusing television deal in the country, the insistence on pushing regional fighters instead of objectively good ones and the general malaise when it comes to constructing big events to occur on Canadian soil are all factors.
The promotion had a great opportunity to cultivate Canada and maintain its upward trajectory given how much the country enjoys contact sports and how much it embraced MMA in the mid-2000s, when such a welcome was hard to find in most places.
Yet here we are, with a world title fight booked for Toronto and Canadians actively undermining it because of the way the UFC has treated them and also their greatest MMA hero.
Nobody would have seen that coming a few years ago, but it’s not hard to see how we got here.
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