UFC 100’s (Minor?) Hiccup
Posted by Alan Conceicao on July 11th, 2009
While the UFC seems to be on fire coming into tonight’s event stateside, having finally achieved some level of mainstream interest for the show whilst the Fan Expo and tickets sales have already been roaring successes, there are some issues elsewhere. In case you were living in a cave the last couple months, a lot of money was spent on the production of TUF 9, which pitted coaches Michael Bisping and Dan Henderson in a nationalistic battle to find out who’s team of scrappy nobodies was best. Thanks to some thoughtful fighter choices on behalf of Joe Silva and Dana White, the UK was given an easy draw and had no problems winning the show.
However, while we as of yet don’t know how successful the winners of TUF 9 will be in terms of drawing the UK fanbase, the premier fighter from the UK is fighting tonight in what should be a hotly watched and debated fight back in his home country. Bisping may be a underdog, but he’s certainly live against the middle aged Dan Henderson, and a win here would propell him all the way to a world title fight. Unfortunately, TUF 9’s initial promotional component has been nullified. With the documented collapse of Setanta Sports (T-MMA was one of the first to bring you details of their impending and eventual destruction) in the United Kingdom, the UFC lost its TV partner. After sorting through many options from major television outlets, none of which paid anything near Setanta’s inflated price, the UFC decided to wait and see who would come to them.
In the end, nobody did. The UFC has been forced to work fast, and has acquired TV space on Sky’s FTA system on what was a dead horse racing channel, off the air now for some period of time. They did this at a price to themselves, and will recieve stark to nonexistent promotion from the network. To try and compensate for the 2/3 of the nation who can’t see them, they’ll also offer a free webcast. Historically, free webcasts of major events in this vein have an awful tendency to crash and have significant issues TV programming lacks (to say nothing of being inconvienent for friends to come over and watch). The UFC still does not have a hard contract going forwards after millions spent in the UK, and it will be interesting to see how they try to compensate for this failure in thinking when it comes to their biggest show ever, featuring one of their biggest draws in what was their most successful emerging market.