Probst: International Cards, Matchmaking Key to Overseas success
The Ultimate Fighting Championship scored a promotional bull’s eye with UFC 134 on Saturday in Brazil, hitting on all cylinders. Why? Well, international cards have unique priorities and agendas, with expectations inversely related to how many shows a promotion has done there in recent years, if any at all.
You have to stock the card with local but reasonably capable talent, with matchups that generate interest in bringing the product back again. Brazil’s MMA scene made the first prospect a relatively easy task, but the bull’s eye was primarily the result of a great card on which the locals came up huge. From UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva’s impressive title defense to Erick Silva’s one-punch destruction of Luis Ramos, it is pretty clear that Brazil has a deep roster of both established and up-and-coming talent.
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If you cruise the Fight Finder half as often as I do, you are quite familiar with the depth and sheer numbers of Brazilian fighters, many of them rising prospects and experienced veterans, often with many more fights than fighters in other nations. With a country of 190 million people, this is an appealing fresh demographic to pursue.
One of the main impediments toward expanding sport into new nations is the fact that they simply do not do it as often, if at all, as the host country. It is incredibly hard to catch up, especially when they already have sports like soccer that rule the roost. The magical element of MMA is that every nation has some sort of martial arts tradition, and the sport’s expanding appeal makes plugging those into an MMA framework a far easier transition, to say nothing of weight classes offering universal access.
I do not know if we will see UFC 175 “Beijing” at some point, but it is a tantalizing prospect about which to think, especially since China is six times larger than Brazil. If it happens, the bantamweights and featherweights better prepare for the party to be summarily crashed.
Jason Probst can be reached at [email protected] or twitter.com/jasonprobst.
