Unless you live under a rock – and evidently some decision makers do – you know that the Ultimate Fighting Championship is constantly expanding its presence, not only in the United States, but across the globe.
UFC president Dana White says the mixed martial arts juggernaut doesn’t plan on slowing down anytime soon.
Speaking at the dais in one of the new markets the promotion has tapped into this year – Memphis for this weekend’s UFC 107 – White says they’re strictly “scientific approach” includes the recently announced Australian expansion in February, Abu Dhabi and Boston sometime in 2010, and several other new markets in other countries.
“It’s that scientific, ‘I like it here, I think we’ll do a fight here,’” he quipped at the UFC 107 pre-fight press conference. “We think about wear the market’s gonna be the strongest. This sport has gotten so big, so fast.”
One market that the promotion’s brass knows will be strong is New York. Fans in New York have been waiting or years, and will continue to wait as MMA sanctioning legislation stalled out again in 2009, but White reasserted that New York is a continued focus of the promotion’s legislative efforts in the U.S.
Now that MMA is legalized and a prohibitive tax situation has been ironed out, he also said that the UFC could be headed to Hawaii “maybe next year.” When the UFC does land on the island, White says, “It would be our first stadium that we would do.”
That would seem to squash rumors that the promotion might hold an event at Fenway Park in Boston. White has often indicated that he would like to go to the Boston Garden anyway.
Regardless of where the promotion does or doesn’t hold an event in the near future, the UFC president has long believed that it’s just a matter of time before the sport, and his brand of it in particular, spreads across the globe.
“When you start talking to the decision makers in Germany or Cologne or different states, they think the UFC is small and nobody has ever heard of it. We know when we put on that event the people are gonna come and it’s gonna be packed. Then after we leave people are blown away,” he explained on Thursday.
“What that does is, just like we did in the U.K., you set off an MMA bomb and the virus starts to spread after you do the live event.”
White said that they sold more than 10,000 tickets to UFC Fight Club members and newsletter subscribers (presale tickets) before UFC 110 even went on sale to the general public, leading him to cancel a planned trip next week to the Land Down Under for a promotional press conference.
“It’s bigger than everybody thinks.”