UFC's desperation cost a great title fight

The UFC has less flexibility than ever before. The result? Robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Illustration by BE Art Director Chris Rini.

This week, the UFC announced a pair of title fights for their upcoming PPV in Toronto. The event had been set to feature a top shelf featherweight championship bout between Alexander Volkanovski and fast rising contender Ilia Topuria. An excellent main event for Canadian fans too used to getting the short end of the stick from the world’s largest MMA promotion.

Instead, what fans will be treated to is a lightweight title fight rematch between Islam Makhachev and Charles Oliveira—along with a women’s bantamweight title fight for Amanda Nunes’ vacated belt, featuring Mayra Bueno Silva taking on former contender Raquel Pennington. Now, before anyone tells me that either of those are—in fact—very good fights and that fans aren’t getting shafted, that’s not quite my point.

There was a time, once, when the UFC’s schedule was fairly flexible. They’d cancel a card if they had to way out ahead of a date, put together a new one close after if they could; squeeze in an extra PPV in a month just to keep the show running. The general point was, they could make the fights they wanted on the dates they wanted, provided the fighters were ready.

UFC 294 didn’t need to go down like that

That’s very clearly no longer the case. The UFC had their card set for Abu Dhabi and they had to have Islam Makhachev on that card if he was going to be healthy to go. Charles Oliveira had a cut on his forhead, probably didn’t need more than a couple extra weeks to heal up, but that didn’t matter because Islam Mkhachev had to be in the main event.

So we got an inadvisably ballsy move from Alexander Volkanovski. He seemed like he was (concerningly) happy for the opportunity, but it’s hard not to look at the aftermath and think that the UFC really shouldn’t have had him on speed dial for that fight. They had Mateusz Gamrot there to play backup.

He was prepared. He might not have sold extra tickets, but with a daytime PPV in Abu Dhabi, the point was never really PPV sales anyway. The promotion got big money just to hold this cards out in the desert, fans wanted to see Makhachev perform, the City Kickboxing star was an unecessary afterthought for a promotion hoping to squeeze every dollar they could out of their international TV audience.