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It has attracted scant attention, but there are there three major mixed martial arts events this weekend and all three of them will be headlined by female fighters. It starts Friday in Honolulu, where Liz Carmouche will seek to continue her post-Ultimate Fighting Championship surge when she challenges the unbeaten Juliana Velasquez for the Bellator MMA women’s flyweight title at Bellator 278. Velasquez unseated Ilima-Lei Macfarlane, who was becoming one of Bellator’s biggest stars, and the hope is that she can capture some of Macfarlane’s cachet while competing in the Hawaiian’s hometown.
The UFC and Bellator on Saturday go head-to-head with their own women’s main events. The UFC offers Amanda Lemos looking to win her sixth straight bout when she takes a significant step up in competition against former champion Jessica Andrade at UFC Fight Night 205. Meanwhile, Bellator counters with all-time great Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino defending her featherweight title in a rematch against Arlene Blencowe at Bellator 279. Bellator should have advantages in star power and setting, while the UFC of course has the brand-name advantage and ESPN+ platform.
Female main events in MMA were once a novelty, but now they don’t really stand out in the public imagination. It’s not as if there are obvious alternatives to any of this weekend’s three main events; those are pretty clearly the top fights on each show. It feels odd that it was only 11 years ago that UFC President Dana White said women would never fight in the Octagon, given how uncontroversial and normal women’s fights now seem.
It isn’t even that female MMA fills a specific cache with its own positives and negatives. Rather, fans by and large view fighting as fighting regardless of which gender is competing. That seems un-notable, but it was not the case relatively recently when early women’s fights were sometimes greeted with whistles and the like. The trend has even spread, with women’s bouts being much more common on boxing cards the past few years.
While women’s MMA has steadily grown in terms of the depth of quality female fighters and the respect paid to female fighters, there are a few ways in which women’s MMA has not advanced and has even moved backwards. Specifically, after many years when Ronda Rousey was one of the top drawing cards in the sport, the UFC hasn’t produced a major female star attraction for quite some time. Rousey headlined six pay-per-views from 2013 to 2016, including three massive buy rates. Women headlined another six pay-per-views through 2018 but only two since May of that year, nearly four years ago. Even that is a little deceptive, as UFC 250’s headliner of Amanda Nunes-Felicia Spencer only headlined after the original Henry Cejudo-Jose Aldo main event fell through.
There are a number of different ways one might view what’s been a marked movement by the UFC away from having women’s fighters headline the promotion’s big shows. It’s certainly open to the criticism that the UFC hasn’t given its female fighters the chance to prove they can draw and earn the increased paychecks that come with that responsibility. Joanna Jedrzejczyk, in particular, has connected with fans and delivered memorable fights but has never been given the opportunity to show she can main event a pay-per-view successfully despite 11 career title fights.
The flipside of that argument is that the UFC is a business and the company’s decision makers are not going to hold back on promoting anyone with whom they think they can draw. They might have implicit assumptions that need to be overcome, but they are open to having their minds changed—as we saw with Rousey. There was a concerted effort to try to turn Nunes into a star, and it just didn’t take as hoped. As great as she has been in the Octagon, she hasn’t captured the public imagination on her own in the way Rousey or even “Cyborg” did. Frustration with Nunes might have trickled into the treatment of women’s flyweight and strawweight stars.
It doesn’t appear the trend against building pay-per-views around female fighters is going to reverse itself anytime soon. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the UFC has felt little pressure to provide much in the way of star power on UFC Apex cards, freeing the company to stack pay-per-views like it used to in years past. That has led to a clear hierarchy in terms of which divisions headline pay-per-views. Since the UFC started running cards again in spring of 2020, there have been 25 pay-per-views. Of those, there have been four heavyweight main events, two light heavyweight main events, three middleweight main events, five welterweight main events, six lightweight main events and a combined five main events in the other seven divisions below 155 pounds.
The argument can be made that size is the bigger differentiator than gender, but either way, it’s not a great climate for female breakthrough stars. As such, this weekend’s cards are a reminder that it’s a good time for women’s MMA broadly, but the conditions are still unfavorable for those who hope to climb to the top level of the sport. It’s likely going to take a special talent and personality to reverse that trend.
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