It began with an announcement from the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism early in the year: Fans would be allowed to attend the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s trio of “Fight Island” events in limited capacity to kick off the promotion’s 2021 schedule.
It was no coincidence that the week would culminate with Conor McGregor’s first appearance in approximately a year. The UFC’s biggest star does not fight in an empty arena, no matter the circumstances. Within one day, individual seats for all three events—UFC on ABC 1, UFC on ESPN 20 and UFC 257—were gone.
There were, of course, enhanced safety protocols in place, including required proof of negative test results, temperature checks, masking, social distancing guidelines and constant sanitization. Etihad Arena, which normally holds 18,000 spectators, was limited to approximately 2,000 fans per event. For all intents and purposes, the endeavor felt like a success.
“Coming into this thing, these fans here were great. It’s cool to have fans,” UFC President Dana White said. “… I don’t know what we’re going to do. I don’t know what this year is going to hold for any of this stuff with what’s going on in the United States.”
As evidenced by White’s statement, no one would have dared to predict what the year to come would hold for live gates at MMA events. As vaccines became more prevalent, so did spectators, and as a result, the return of fans to the fights is Sherdog.com’s “Story of the Year” for 2021. Unlike the 2020 “Story of the Year,” which was a clear-cut victory for the pandemic’s effect on MMA, staff votes were split regarding the big news of the past year. Other noteworthy candidates included the meteoric rise of social-media-star-turned-boxer Jake Paul and his ability to lure MMA fighters into freakshow fights; the emergence of underdog UFC champions such as Charles Oliveira, Glover Teixeira and Brandon Moreno; a full year of inactivity from pound-for-pound stalwarts Khabib Nurmagomedov, Jon Jones and Henry Cejudo; and the revamping of the UFC lightweight division following Nurmagomedov’s retirement.
Ultimately, it turned out that even though spectators grew to enjoy the raw feel of a live broadcast where strikes, takedowns, trash talk and cornermen accounted for virtually all the sound during a fight, fans are still a big deal.
That became even more obvious later in the year, when the promotion announced that UFC 261 would head to 15,000-seat Vystar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida, with no capacity restrictions in April. The event was something of a thank you to the city after the UFC was allowed to hold a trio of events at the same venue following the pandemic-mandated government shutdown in May 2020. There was little to no trepidation among Floridians when it came to venturing out in large crowds, as the event sold out in a matter of minutes and broke the arena record for highest gross. As with Abu Dhabi, there were safety measures in place, including a mobile health survey and free masks. Accompanying a ticket purchase was an Assumption of Risk waiver with some ominous but necessary language:
“The Holder fully understands and agrees that...attendance at [UFC 261] may lead to exposure to COVID-19 and that contraction of COVID-19 may result in severe and permanent damage to the health of the Holder and/or others, including, but not limited to, death, fever, weight loss, irreversible pulmonary, respiratory and/or neurological system damage, loss of taste or smell, mental or emotional distress, temporary or permanent disability, loss of income, loss of employment, loss of financial or other opportunities, medical expenses, which may or may not be covered by insurance, cleaning expenses, mandatory self-quarantine…”
White was his typical defiant self in the face of criticism, and he targeted his hometown paper, the Las Vegas Review Journal, for a writeup he felt was critical of the promotion’s decision to allow fans.
“Hey Las Vegas, this is our piece of s--- local newspaper,” White said. “Through this entire pandemic, we didn’t lay off a single employee, we worked with governmental agencies in Nevada and around the world to put on every event safely and we chose to bring our biggest fight of the year with Conor McGregor back to town July 10 to help relaunch the city. Yet, this is how the Las Vegas Review Journal shows its support for a true local business. Go f--- yourself LVRJ, and don’t bother coming to the fight in July.”
Once UFC 261 got underway, the effect of the crowd was immediately evident. The opening bout—an otherwise nondescript matchup between Ariane Carnelossi and Na Liang—set the tone for the card, as both competitors were buoyed by the boisterous throng and brawled enthusiastically in the opening minutes. The card as a whole was quite memorable, concluding with Rose Namajunas’ shocking knockout of Weili Zhang in the co-main event and Kamaru Usman’s resounding resolution of his rivalry with Jorge Masvidal in the headliner.
As far as the packed arena itself, well, there were mixed reviews.
“I don’t think it gets any better than tonight,” White said.
Others, meanwhile, questioned the intelligence of filling an indoor arena to capacity with thousands of screaming, unmasked fans:
15K people inside an arena watching UFC tonight in Florida, which had 7400 COVID cases today. Crowd shots show virtually no mask use.
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) April 25, 2021
UFC 261 was the beginning of a once-a-month occurrence in which the organization allowed fans with no capacity restrictions in arenas for pay-per-view events. Fans attended cards in Phoenix, Houston, Las Vegas, Abu Dhabi and New York over the course of the year, but UFC Fight Night and UFC on ESPN cards continued to take place at the UFC Apex. According to White, it was the safest approach in what was still an uncertain time throughout the world.
“We’re not even looking at Fight Nights [for fans],” White said following UFC 262 in Houston. “We didn’t even have gates in our budget until October and November. Right now, to start trying to find places for Fight Nights, it just makes no sense. We’ll stay at the cozy at the [UFC] Apex and do our thing for the rest of the year, I think.”
Other organizations gradually followed the UFC’s lead in allowing fans back into arenas. Bellator MMA in June allowed spectators to return in limited numbers at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, before ramping up to full-house shows in California and Arizona later in the year. Bellator was ahead of the UFC in one area, as it also went back to holding international shows with cards in Moscow and Dublin in 2021.
Meanwhile, promotions such as the Professional Fighters League, KSW, One Championship and Rizin Fighting Federation all took various approaches to welcoming back spectators. One Championship eventually went back to tape-delayed broadcasts due to a COVID-19 surge in Singapore, while Rizin shuffled its schedule due to pandemic restrictions in Japan.
As COVID cases have risen in recent months with the emergence of the Omicron variant, it remains unclear what effect, if any, it will have on fan attendance at MMA events in the coming year. While White and fighters praised the UFC’s ability to welcome back the masses in 2021, the full arenas also came with consequences.
Sherdog.com Senior Editor Ben Duffy attended UFC 262 and UFC 265 in Houston as a member of the credentialed media. Protocols were stricter at the May event than they were in August, as restrictions loosened, in part, due to the increasing prevalence of the COVID vaccine.
“At UFC 262, mask and distancing protocols were in place for media, and they were strictly enforced,” Duffy said. “Strictly enforced as in, if you got up from your workstation to go get a cup of coffee, you had to have a mask on, then could take it back off at your seat. We got tested twice that week by the UFC and at its expense, and you either needed to be staying at the fighter hotel, in the couple of floors that they had made into effectively a quarantine zone, or if you were local like me, you could stay at your own home and get re-screened every day. The event itself was a packed house, masks optional, and like every other mask-optional thing in Texas, that meant maybe 10% of people in the stands were wearing masks. Press row was still mask-mandatory, as well as spaced out (six feet between each workstation), and all the UFC staff was masked, as well.
“Ahead of UFC 265, the UFC announced that masks were optional for members of the press who could show proof of vaccination,” he continued. “I had been vaccinated back in April, but I still masked up at things like the open-to-the-public presser, which was full of mouth-breathers in the literal as well as figurative sense. On fight night, I didn’t wear my mask for most of the night, and on top of that, I ended up greeting and talking to quite a few local MMA friends. A few days later, I started feeling awful, and sure enough, I had a breakthrough case of COVID-19 that laid me out for a solid week and left me at less than my best for close to two months. Frankly, I still don’t think my sense of smell and taste is really back to normal.”
It is no coincidence the UFC eventually inked a multi-event partnership with Houston’s Toyota Center, because the promotion can sell out a venue with relative ease in Texas thanks to the state’s less stringent approach to the pandemic. UFC 271 is set for the same arena in Houston on Feb. 12.
“At [UFC] 265, in the crowd, there was not even the faintest pretense of risk mitigation,” Duffy said. “In an 18,000-seat arena, I seriously might have seen 50 people in masks. In terms of local impact, my wife is a nurse at a local hospital who has been working more or less exclusively with COVID patients since last spring, so we have a pretty good finger on the pulse. It ended up being a super-spreader event, along with the [American League baseball] playoffs, which were happening around the same time in the same general part of town. Our hospitals were taxed beyond capacity after that.”
By the time 2022 arrives, it will be nearly two full years since the pandemic first hit in earnest. The UFC—and the rest of the MMA world—will undoubtedly do its best to continue a march toward normalcy. How close it gets to achieving that goal remains to be seen.