Mike had a great article on Monday in regards to how the impact of high ticket prices and a steady stream of shows is “bleeding Vegas dry.” But it isn’t just Vegas residents with aching pocketbooks.
We all know that the economy is in bad shape and if you’ve followed the news at all in the last week you know that the American taxpayers are very close to taking on a lot of added financial responsibility as we creep closer and closer to a 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout. Getting beyond the politics of the matter and down to what matters to this site, what does this mean for the UFC?
With the current state of the economy we heard a lot of talk about how luxuries are the first to go from Joe Taxpayer’s budget. Yet despite a housing crisis and severe devaluation of the dollar the UFC continues to pull solid live gates and do big PPV numbers. But, as taxpayers are given additional financial strain eventually something has to give. If things get worse eventually the entertainment dollars just won’t be there and $50 monthly pay-per-view shows are just going to be too much for more and more people.
What would this mean for the UFC? I assume that it would mean a stronger focus on getting their shows on network television where advertising revenue would somewhat offset the money they would then be failing to make off of PPV buys. This could potentially turn a negetive situation for fans into a huge positive with more free cards, and would also allow the UFC to build up hype for broadcasts of a select few “elite events” on PPV (a Couture/Lesnar level event for example). $50 every three or four months is much less painful to the bank accounts of Americans struggling to get by than $200 in that same timeframe.
Then again, we’ve seen the UFC and major networks go ’round the carousel more than once with no substantial results. If the stubbornness of the UFC to give up some degree of their production leads to an inability to get on a network bigger than Spike and a continued expectation of fans to pour money into pay-per-view then it could turn out that the biggest threat to the UFC empire was never Elite XC or Affliction, it was the badly damaged United States economy.
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