The bottom is sinking in the non-UFC US MMA market

UFC 314 was heralded as a card worthy of hardcore attention. Finally, a modern UFC fight card that was respectable. Intriguingly, early Google Trends revealed good but not great numbers — which may or may not serve as a form of confirmation bias that if you’re into the current UFC product, you’re into it. If you’re not, you’re not.

Which is not great news if you are attempting to be a mid-major or major alternative to the UFC in the 2025 MMA marketplace.

This week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast with Nate Wilcox & Zach Arnold has an in-depth look at the big trends emerging from the UFC 314 event in Miami. Some of our observations include:

• Dana White showing more and more signs of checking out from day-to-day duties

• “Sellouts” not automatically selling out, especially after recent crypto & stock market turmoil

• Age is a real number in Mixed Martial Arts and how putting fighters over the age of 30 on ice can be a real damaging blow

• The ghost of past champions haunting current champions and contenders

• The development of state-sponsored Mixed Martial Arts and what it means for American business, sport, and culture. Why the world’s elite are negotiating deals worth millions of dollars cage side and how this behavior is normalizing.

For our paid subscribers, we have an in-depth business discussion regarding the state of affairs with the GFL, the PFL, and media money. How fast are we approaching the bottom? How much more debt financing is available? Will a major media player be willing to grab a piece of a company in order to keep it alive?

Zach is fired up on this week’s podcast to talk about the insanity of fight financing.

“They are fighting over breadcrumbs. Imagine, and I've seen this unfortunately in the combat sports space, you can go to someone. They may have $100 in their pocket and you may give them an opportunity to make $100,000 or maybe even $1 million dollars but they would rather backstab you. And instead of making a million dollars, they would rather fight to the death to just castrate you in order to keep the $100 in their pocket. They are too busy worrying about control and image and everything else that's outside of the actual business and what makes fight sports so great and why people want to tune in and why people are invested in it and why they care and why they get so animated.”

“And no one else right now has an idea of how to even generate buzz in this space because the few people that are left are too busy backstabbing each other and killing off any sort of future opportunity.”

If you want a great mixture of current UFC fight discussion along with real world implications of failure for non-TKO players, this week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast is well worth your time to check out. You will hear opinion and analysis that you simply won’t find anywhere else.