Spite

I think Dana must have been smoking a fat one with Nick Diaz again. Over a billion viewers watched the 2010 World Cup final between Spain and Holland. I bet you can add up the total viewers of every UFC event from 1 to 145 and it would be well short of a billion.

Liddellianenko

All he had was first mover's advantage, which is pretty close to luck in the business world.

Boxing was too watered down and MMA was conceptualized and legalized by the Gracies. Dana just took a boatload of money from the Fertittas and tidied up an idea whose time had already come.

Take a comparison from the online world. Is facebook really the best / most optimized social networking site? Is hotmail really the best online email provider? Is internet explorer really the best internet browser? No. On the contrary, they are all quite shit, but have or have had until recently the highest market share.

They just have first mover's advantage. With ideas that had already been pioneered by others, they were just the first to dump money into it or piggy back off an existing base. In Dana's case, he was piggy-backing off the Fertitta's existing casino empire in Vegas.

Hard work and business skill are reflected by the likes Google, who come out of nowhere and capture the market based on superb quality & practices.

The world loves combat, it's man's oldest instinct and the base for all other sports. The entire idea of sports originally in the tribal context was to abstract away combat into less violent but still competitive skills that could carry over into combat. That and highlight who the best warriors among them were, without having said warriors killed before the need for them arose.

Javelin throwing, archery, shot put, wrestling, athletics etc. were direct combat skills, and team sports useful abstractions of war etc.

The point is MMA as a sport is bound to succeed the moment it's made legal. All it needed was some investment and polish, and Dana got lucky being the first one to spot it. That's it.

His amazing business sense is reflected by stupid comments like this and constant childish behavior. The man has zero goodwill or credibility with fighters, the public or TV execs, most bigwigs think he's a childish egotistical idiot and have said as much in interviews.

If he didn't have first mover's advantage with someone else's money in a sport destined to succeed this guy couldn't make a penny. He has made every dumb move you could make and pissed off everyone he could possibly piss off.

If he wasn't sitting at the head of an org with first mover's advantage in a sport we are bound to love, no one would give a fig about this moron.

oldfan

Dana is a smart man. Maybe he's been consulting with chael. Someone in the UFC is smart enough to figure that out of the 2-3 billion people he just trolled, some % is going to tune into the UFC to see WTF he's talking about.

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Killz

I think you are massively over estimating the exposure the UFC and MMA in general have in the UK.

Bisping, Hardy, Pearson etc are not known outside of UK MMA fans. There is literally zero MMA on Uk TV other than the occasional BAMMA event that shows on some random channel (that you wouldnt know about unless you specifically went looking for it) and the UFC which is shown only on a subscription channel at 3am in the morning.

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K R Y

Got to agree with Killstarz. Bisping, Pearson, Hardy, ANY UK fighter is not a house hold name in the UK. They're barely known, only MMA fans will know who they are.

Football > Boxing > ----------- MMA in the UK.

ASKREN4WIN

So there are no channels that show episodes of UFC Unleashed etc. Do TUF episodes air in the UK. If not then that sucks.

I have FUEL TV and that channel rocks. It should be called UFC television. HDNET is awesome also.

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Fav Fighters:
BJ
GSP
Askren
JDS
Belcher
Shogun
Fedor
Hendo
Sonnen

Killz

Unleashed airs sporadically throughout the year on the same channel as the PPVs (ESPN which you have to pay monthly for). Always after 11pm at night, usually early morning 1amish though.

TUF is also airing on ESPN this series although in the past has aired on other channels. It is very rarely advertised though.


EDIT: It's worth noting, ESPN is not a popular channel in the UK. it predominantly shows american sports, German/italian football, the occasional EPL game and the UFC. Every person I know who pays for ESPN does it for the UFC coverage only.

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luckbox

Dana White in delusional statement shocker.

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Hiro

He is probably basing this on how many countries have the UFC on a tv channel, but in reality the UFC to soccer is what Earth is Antares.

In England alone, just across the top 4 divisions there are over 100 teams which have fan followings of thousands upon thousands each. Every week there are dozens of games up and down the country and several involving the best teams are shown on TV and watched by millions. If there was a stat out there for the total number of spectators on a Saturday I reckon it would be a significant percentage of our population.

There are hundreds if not more, of other leagues other than those top 4 too - regional leagues, children's leagues at almost every age group, school leagues, pub leagues and on and on. There's thousands of games being played every week. That's just in one country. It's ingrained into society on a level MMA will never come close to in our lifetimes.

b45her

the useless git who was banging katie price (jordan) was a household name for a couple of months , he was apparently a mma fighter .