Ultimate Fighting Championship legends Alexander Volkanovski and Kamaru Usman stepped in on eleven days’ notice to keep UFC 294 alive amidst two of the original fighters having to pull out of the event due to injury. This is a key example of why the UFC and the world of mixed martial arts have grown tremendously in the last thirty years.
UFC 294, taking place in Abu Dhabi, was supposed to feature a lightweight championship fight between current champion Islam Makhachev and No. 1 contender, former lightweight champion Charles Oliveira. Oliveira was forced to pull out of the fight due to a gash across his eye sustained during sparring.
Middleweight Paulo Costa was scheduled to fight in the co-main event against Khamzat Chimaev, but is instead recovering from an elbow surgery to combat bursitis. Former welterweight champion Kamaru Usman is now stepping in for Costa to fight Chimaev. Usman and Chimaev have been chirping for a few months about a fight, and now fans are getting what they want.
The previous meeting between Makhachev and Volkanovski was non-stop action. UFC 284 in Perth, Australia garnered an attendance of 14,000 with a total gate revenue of $4 Million, the seventh UFC event held in Australia since 2010. Volkanovski had a total output of 164 significant strikes and Makhachev had a total of four takedowns, but Makhachev’s total control time was from 7:37 to Volkanovski’s 2:55. Makhachev won via decision victory to retain his champion status.
The UFC is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and viewership has increased dramatically since the league’s start. This is due to the social media spotlight and the league’s ability to matchmake fights with the top MMA fighters around the world. The fight promotion has sanctioned forty-nine events and counting.
Sponsorships with companies like ESPN, Crypto.com and Monster Energy have also helped to grow the sport. More recently, the UFC announced a merger with the WWE. Time will tell what can come out of that mega-partnership.
The UFC has consistently had events with pay per view models that sold over a million pay per views in the last decade alone, the biggest being Conor Mcgregor vs Khabib Nurmagomedov (2018) with a PPV sale of 2.4 million buys in the United States alone. Not only was this the most watched UFC event ever, but also one of the top-viewed sporting events in history, ranking up there with Floyd Mayweather Vs. Manny Pacquiao.
Eric Lambkins II, 40, is a retired army veteran who used to train in MMA, and has been an avid fan of UFC since its inception in 1993. Lambkins believes that UFC’s single-promoter system leads to stronger matchups than are often seen in boxing.
“UFC I think has usurped the world of boxing in terms of quality of fights, there is no room or opportunity for you to duck any fighter…you have to fight whoever is placed in front of you.”
The UFC opened 2023 with a series of highly-anticipated fights, including UFC 283 Teixeira vs. Hill. On March 4, fan-favorite Jon Jones took on Ciryl Gane. Jones made his highly anticipated return to the octagon after three years off and quickly proceeded to defeat the No. 1 contender for the heavyweight championship in under two minutes via submission.
UFC 285 saw 19,471 fans at the T-Mobile Arena in Nevada. Dana White, president of the UFC, stated that the gate revenue was over $12 million.
Robert Carvajhol, 43, is a South Los Angeles-based muay thai trainer and former competitor in muay thai. He attributes the UFC’s immense growth to fighters pushing their personal backstories leading up to the fights.
“People want to see what is entertaining, like a story behind it. You know, if somebody’s just fighting just to fight, like they rather have somebody that has a beef.”
Recently, the UFC has done a great job of drawing in a younger audience with younger fighters. The youngest UFC fighter ever, Raul Rosas Jr., made his debut in 2022 at the age of 18. Rosas has found success in the ring with his wrestling and grappling ability.
Rosas has inspired other young fighters like Cristian Carrasco, a 20-year-old Los Angeles-based kickboxer with a professional record of 1-0 in the International Fight Showdown organization.
“Seeing him I was like, ‘Dang, he’s 18 and he’s already in the UFC,’” said Carrasco. “He manhandled the guy he fought…obviously it inspires me to keep going and if I really want to make a push.”
Carrasco said that he felt that the limitations of traditional boxing stifled his ability to grow, and believes that by continuing to learn different fighting disciplines, he can develop into a professional fighter.
Boxing has lost some of its brilliance due to so-called up-and-coming fighters amassing wins in the amateurs against less skilled competitors, leading to impressive undefeated records that aren’t representative of their abilities. Many title belts that undermine one another across different fighting sanctions and fighters ducking qualified opponents to avoid losses make the sport less appealing to a modern audience.
On the other hand, the UFC has one belt per weight division. The path to that belts lies in beating top-ranked fighters and taking the risk of brawling fighters of different styles. Current UFC champions are all well-rounded, with an emphasis on either striking, wrestling, grappling or jiu jitsu.
Lambkins II recalled how he had to become versatile in the army due to losing many wrestling matches and grappling fights in the military. He learned that in the military you need a variety of fighting styles to be successful in combat.
“It wasn’t until I really put some blood and sweat equity inside the sand pit to learn how to fight off my back and how to counter that my fighting trajectory took off.”
The UFC’s global reach has strengthened its popularity. Unlike boxing, it has top fighters from Africa, Mexico, Iceland, Russia, China and Canada. Every continent in the world is represented in the UFC. As the events become even more widely watched, the venues will step outside of America.
The UFC has had success in globalizing their sport with the second-largest pay per view in organizations history that took place in Abu Dhabi on the UFC fight Island. UFC 257 where Ireland’s McGregor faced off against Louisiana native, Dustin Porier for the trilogy fight. The event sold over 1.5 million pay per view buys.
UFC 275 is another great example of the UFC’s global reach. This main event saw a 40-year old Brazilian jiu jitsu fighter Glover Teixeira versus a young muay thai fighter Jiri Procházka who hails from the Czech Republic. The event took place in Kallang, Singapore and sold out with an attendance of 10,787 and a ticket revenue of $1,546,732.
With the rise of the UFC comes a concern around injuries. Fighting disciplines like boxing, kickboxing, karate, kung-fu and Muay Thai have high rates of head and facial injuries. Disciplines like jiu jitsu, judo and wrestling have right rates of joint damage. According to the Sports Health, “head and facial injuries comprise between 57.8% and 70% of competition injuries in these athletes.”
The article found that, “A prospective study of 950 Brazilian jiu-jitsu athletes found that joint injuries, particularly of the knee and elbow, were the most common injuries during competition (64.5 percent). A study of Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitions (2005-2011) found that 78% of injuries were orthopedic in nature, with the elbow being the most frequently injured joint.”
But Carrasco says he’s not afraid of injury. He sees them as an opportunity to learn and grow.
“I don’t really think about that to be honest,” Carrasco said. “It’s not even about that, a lot of this is relatable to real life situations. We all go through things and you see it in MMA training, we get hit and it’s our job to get up and go through it.”
The UFC will end its 30th year anniversary with UFC 295 and UFC 296. These two fight cards have some of the rosters’ most beloved and infamous stars fighting. Fans dream of the fights that the promotion consistently put out.