UFC Buys Strikeforce
By Dr. Octagon, M.D., legal and MMA correspondent
We recently predicted that Strikeforce would go bust. On Saturday Dana White announced in an exclusive interview with Ariel Helwani that Zuffa, UFC’s parent company, has purchased Strikeforce. Dana said that the deal was made in less than six months.
What prompted the sale? It appears Strikeforce’s Heavyweight Grand Prix blew up in their face immediately, with both Fedor and Andrei Arlovski, two of the promotion’s most marketable fighters losing badly.
My guess is Strikeforce was bleeding money and immediately after Fedor lost they knew they weren’t going to be able to afford to set up another card for Showtime. Dana probably purchased them for a very low price due to the fact that they have two types of fighters: good fighters with ridiculous contracts and terrible fighters.
So what does it all mean? It remains to be seen what will happen, but it sounds like Dana is going to honor all the Strikeforce contracts and then wind it down as they expire.
Dana also said that they are going to keep going with women’s fights for the time being, although he doesn’t think there is enough talent to justify it. Unsurprisingly, I totally agree with him on that point.
The best part of this is that all the best fighters in the world (bar the lightest weight classes) will all be in the same league once they are inevitably combined. MMA is still a very young sport, but if it can avoid the fragmentation of titles that has plagued boxing it would be better for the average fan.
Those that want to casually follow the sport don’t want to have to pay attention to whose record is padded with easy fights, who is ducking who, which titles are real and which are bullshit and all the other problems that currently make boxing much more complicated to follow than virtually any other sport.
The biggest issue with the merger is fighters will have even less bargaining power. The UFC is now the only game in town. You want to fight for another league? Good luck finding anyone decent to fight.
Previously when UFC wasn’t offering enough money (as for Fedor and Henderson) Strikeforce would make a more lucrative offer, or in Fedor’s case, provide a less-restrictive contract. Now there won’t be any other organization that can make a decent fight.
The UFC’s lawyers should be getting ready for a potential antitrust action the first time they try to play hardball with a marquee fighter. No one really knows how much these guys are getting paid (lots of payments are undisclosed), but the disclosed amounts some of these guys are getting for pay per view fights are often shockingly low.
We just came from covering the Sergio Martinez fight, which was contested in a small theater at Foxwoods that wasn’t totally full and aired on HBO. Martinez made more than a million dollars for the fight. We cannot recall ever having seen an MMA fighter making that much even for a sold-out arena show that was heavily bought on Pay Per View.
At the end of the day, these are the guys whose brains are getting scrambled and we hope that they are paid a fair wage for it.
It will be interesting to see how this develops, but we have never been a fan of Strikeforce and if UFC can bring the same professional matchmaking and production over to that organization, while making sure that the fighters are fairly compensated, this will be a great thing for the sport.
As for the fighters, we don’t think there are too many (barring the formidable heavyweight division) that would be able to contend for a title against UFC-caliber talent. Then again, we might eventually get to see how good fighters like Nick Diaz or Gilbert Melendez actually are.