2023: UFC business was booming, fandom not so much

Looking back on 2023 leaves a sense that MMA didn't deliver it's best work, but UFC business was still booming.

Illustration by BE Art Director Chris Rini.

It’s hard not to look back on 2023 and feel like the chips are down on MMA as a whole. The latest PFL season failed to deliver anything like a compelling series of finale matchups. Bellator continued putting on reasonable, decent shows in front of a dwindling audience to the point that they finally sold off their assets and are likely to close up shop in the coming year or so.

Then there’s the UFC. Having started 2023 on the right foot—with the long awaited return of Jon Jones and a superfight between Alexander Volkanovski & Islam Makhachev—by the back half of the year it felt like the promotion was doing all it could just to make sure they still had PPV cards to put on, let alone high profile fights to headline them.

Jones got injured, Conor McGregor’s return never materialized, and Israel Adesanya dropped his belt to Sean Strickland and decided to take a long break from competition. There were still highlights, but for the first time since the pandemic, the UFC failed to put 20k+ fans in an arena for any given event (they came close a couple times).

Suffice to say, in terms of high profile fight years, the UFC has had better ones. Financially, however? Business seems better than ever.