The Bottom Line: Money Talks

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The announcement that Bellator MMA and the Rizin Fighting Federation will be collaborating again on New Year’s Eve makes a lot of sense for both parties. For Bellator, featuring its top stars in front of a big Japanese crowd with world-class production makes its brand look major league. The odds are also good that its fighters come out on the winning side of most of the matchups against Rizin, making Bellator look good and giving its fighters momentum heading into their next stateside assignments. Bellator President Scott Coker is the single MMA promoter most fond of working with other companies, and it has tended to go well for him over the years.

For Rizin’s part, a big hook of Japanese combat sports has always been its athletes and promotions testing themselves against athletes and promotions from other parts of the world. Even if they fall short, the Japanese public tends to admire and reward their fighting spirit. Japan has also gotten less of that type of competition the last couple years, with tighter COVID-19 restrictions limiting the number of foreign athletes and entertainers entering the country. Plus, it’s not as if Rizin is placing its top drawing cards in the fights against Bellator. It’s an additional hook to supplement Rizin’s usual year-end festivities. So, if Bellator-Rizin is a win-win arrangement for both parties, why are promotional collaborations such a rarity in MMA?

The first and most obvious answer to that question is that the most powerful MMA companies tend not to want to cooperate with others. This is obviously true at present with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which is so dominant over every other MMA promotion that there is no need or desire to co-promote with anyone else. The UFC doesn’t want to share the profits, knowing it brings in much more of the money, and it doesn’t want to give the other promotion the publicity. This was the case even when UFC stood to profit handsomely from cooperation, such as in negotiations to bring a Brock Lesnar-Fedor Emelianenko bout to fruition.

It’s important to note this is not a trait unique to the UFC. Back when Pride Fighting Championships was the dominant global brand, the UFC wanted to collaborate with Pride and even sent fighters such as Chuck Liddell and Ricco Rodriguez to the organization (one caveat: this was before Liddell became the superstar into which he would later develop and during a period when the UFC wasn’t particularly fond of dealing with Rodriguez). UFC President Dana White proudly spoke on UFC pay-per-view of bringing Pride stars to the UFC, but Pride never returned the favor. Its stars were more valuable to Pride in Japan than they were fighting in the United States, so the UFC’s hopes of a longer-term promotional arrangement quickly fell apart.

Even setting aside the UFC, the current landscape doesn’t lend itself to collaboration. The Professional Fighters League and its tournament format doesn’t lend itself to one-off fights with other competitors, even if Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino-Kayla Harrison is the biggest makeable collaborative fight in the sport. One Championship has its own focus in Asia and isn’t really playing to the same fans as any of its potential partners. Few players in the space are looking at competitors as partners with which to work.

Then there is a final and crucial factor working against co-promotion in MMA: a lack of fan demand. This isn’t boxing, where rival promoters would rather protect their fighters than cooperate to put together the fights that fans most want to see. In MMA, the average pay-per-view buying fan most wants to see UFC champions defending against the most deserving UFC contenders. They get that.

As compelling as the potential matchups may have been, there was limited demand among UFC fans for Eddie Alvarez or Michael Chandler to fight the best in the UFC until they came to UFC and started proving themselves. Until then, they were off on an island. The same goes today for A.J. McKee. Average fans literally don’t know what they’re missing out on. That’s unfortunate because it works against allowing us to see some juicy matchups, but it’s just the reality.

Co-promotion isn’t ultimately about some abstract concept of cooperation; it’s about making everyone money. In a multipolar MMA world, there will often be times when the biggest fights can be made by different promotions getting together. That’s the case with boxing: The best fights get made less often, but when they get made, it’s more often because of cooperation between rival promoters. In today’s MMA world, where there is one hegemon and then everyone else, the biggest fights get made more often, but when an enticing fight needs co-promotion to get made, that fight rarely takes place. As such, co-promotions like the Bellator-Rizin event in December are going to be rarities for the foreseeable future.