When the UFC announced plans to go to the Phillipines, Australia, Germany, and other countries next year on top of regular shows in the United Kingdom, my immediate concern was that there would be too many shows. Spike obviously is not willing to carry all the minor shows, and weak PPV cards only water down the brand. Apparently my fears were misguided, because some of these shows will not air at all. Dave Meltzer reported this week in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that some shows might not air on PPV or Spike TV, the idea would just be to grow the local fanbase by running there:
Dana White said Lorenzo Fertitta’s main focus has been on making international deals. He said they are on television in the Philippines on a major network station doing big ratings so that’s a target for 2009, as in Australia, Brazil, Germany and Dubai. White said they would be doing grassroots shows in some of these places, which I had the impression means using local fighters and the UFC name and maybe name fighters in the main event, including doing some shows just as live house show events for the market. Some new market shows wouldn’t be big enough for PPV and wouldn’t necessarily be on Spike.
This is obviously the right idea. They can use mostly local fighters in a place like the Phillipines along with two or three big name stars from local TV to draw a big crowd, without incurring the costs of flying the entire operation over there. Even if there are losses at first, they can probably be recovered in DVD sales, because I imagine that a show that was never aired on PPV or Spike TV would sell a lot of units.
Last year I was pretty critical about the overall expansion effort, but I’m starting to take a new view of things. They are clearly working with major international consulting firms to create a strategy, and there’s no doubt they are going to be pouring millions into this. Most plans like this assume major losses for years, and I’m not really confident that anyone criticizing these plans really knows enough about them to do so. One thing I am confident of is that most people that do the snarky criticism of these plans probably don’t have a fraction of the business experience that the international business consultants that devised this plan do, and it may be a worthwhile exercise in humility to sit back and watch to see if the plan works in the long term.