The Gentrification of the UFC
by Alex Blum
Check out my discussion with Alex Blum about his zine article on the gentrification of the UFC. Listen on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. Read the article below and buy a copy of the zine here.
You’ve probably seen the “Just Bleed” guy. Red, raging, possibly roided, the letters painted in white on his chest as he roars, spittle flying, flexing, dripping beers, for the camera at a UFC live event. He no longer watches the sport, and allegedly works as an accountant, but at the time he represented all that mixed martial arts was about—big, stupid, possibly illegal, goofball fun.
But today, you may find Mark Zuckerberg or Jared Leto cageside at a UFC event. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla seemingly rented out (though Dana White denies it) the entire seating space for a crowdless event back in 2022. And that’s a new thing as well – a crowdless event. It was a victory touted by Dana White from the early days of COVID, back when the UFC returned to broadcasting events after a brief pause in May 2020. The empty VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida enabled the promotion to put on fights without a crowd at a time when the virus had shut down global sports.
The silent arena at first had an eerie ring of truth to it. It housed the brutal demolition of Tony Ferguson on a 12-feet win streak at the hands of Justin Gaethje, an empty arena echoing the thud of every brutal punch until the fight was waved off by veteran ref Herb Dean. Ferguson simply backed up, head shaking, trying to jolt his brain back into the fight, like an injured dog. I’d never seen anything quite like it. This fight, and the emergence of the empty arena, signaled a vibe shift in the sport. Old faces, such as Ferguson, Cowboy Cerrone, Robbie Lawler, Tyron Woodley, Frankie Edgar, and countless, countless others, were slowly withering away. And they were doing so at the same time when the UFC Apex emerged, a small facility attached to the UFC’s Performance Institute in Las Vegas.
The Apex contains a smaller cage than a typical full-crowd arena, and worse cards. The Apex has become notorious in recent years for housing the UFC’s least-stacked events in an overstocked calendar, due to their commitment to putting on a minimum threshold of fight cards annually as part of their broadcast deal with Disney’s ESPN. Fight nights, previously a marquee feature of the sport, always in a new town somewhere in America, whether Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or Boise, Idaho, put the UFC on the road. They brought fights to small towns across America, showcasing top talent and occasionally even title fights outside of big-ticket PPVs. Multiple ranked fighters often appeared on these cards. They were a core piece of the product.
But since 2020, that has changed. The Apex in Las Vegas, capable of holding only a minimal crowd for fighters’ families and celebrity guests, has held nearly one-hundred events in the past four years, typically half the promotion’s shows in a given month. Full live crowds are back for pay-per-views and select cities (Nashville, San Diego, etc.), but smaller markets like Sioux Falls and Boise are out for good. Gone, too, are most of the big names. Fight nights are now headlined by up-and-coming talent, sometimes ranked outside the top ten, often with no other ranked fighters on the card. Dana White, ostensibly a conservative who relished in rejecting elite consensus by putting on fights in early 2020, clings to this watered-down, COVID-created minimal-crowd model, depriving middle America of shows on the road and putting on main events no one would buy tickets to see.
While it is tempting to blame such a decline in color, spectacle, and overall joy on late capitalism, the reality is more like late managerialism. Just as J. Robert Oppenheimer would have been denied credentials to work on the Manhattan Project in today’s governmental hierarchy, large organizations in phases of extended success begin to tamp down on innovation, novelty, and interesting ideas, and settle into the deeply-worn grooves which have generated either do-nothing jobs or shareholder value. “Move fast and break things” rapidly becomes a minor iteration on the same repetitive gadgets. Even the most radical innovations, such as the Apple Vision Pro VR goggles, just pick up the regular internet and place it “closer” to the user. The main application of AI so far is just better Google Search and lower quality junk images, videos, and the continued Wikipedia-fication of human knowledge.
As the UFC has aged, it has simplified, cut originality, and simply stripped down the product. Fighters can’t have sponsorships on their shorts, earning less opportunities to be paid. Uniforms created by one corporate sponsorship that pays the promotion, not the fighters, are mandated. The Rock’s signature shoe is introduced, following the same playbook–paying the company centrally, not the fighters. Bizarre spectacles like “UFC: Fight for the Troops” events, spectated by thousands of soldiers in camouflage, are unlikely to return. Multi-city press conference tours like Conor McGregor vs Jose Aldo simply don’t happen anymore. Seasonal press conferences showcasing dozens of fighters lined up for the coming months also don’t occur. In-Octagon face-offs to set up future fights are few and far between, press conferences at events are shorter and more constrained, and the promotion usually announces main events just a couple of months before they’re scheduled, a far cry from the pre-COVID schedule often laid out half-a-year in advance. The company is coasting. The bells and whistles are no longer needed.
The United States may still be driven by bread and circus, but the circus is dryer, smaller than it once was. Beach cities in California are often ghost towns on Friday nights. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are really easy to watch, even when you know they’re bad. Quality doesn’t matter. Rather, consistency does. More, lower-quality fight cards. More, lower-quality content. As long as it’s there, it’s doing its job. Who cares who’s on the card? Be grateful for the content. Quality is negotiable.
The thing-in-itself is enough. Its exact composition hardly matters. Like a priest getting up for his five-hundred-and-fiftieth sermon, it’s easy to coast. After all, what matters is that something is said. The specifics of what is said can be figured out in post-production.