“UFC will be the biggest sport in the world by 2020. People were saying I was a lunatic 10 years ago when we first got this going, but the stuff we’re working on right now on so many levels is mind-boggling…. The sport was just sanctioned in Massachusetts and Vancouver. We’re going to get it done in Ontario and New York in 2010. And we’re already working on taking the UFC global. We’ve already done Germany, England and Ireland, and we just sold 22,000 seats for an event in Australia in 15 minutes…. Right now we are on some form of television in over 175 countries. We’re all human beings and we all ‘get’ fighting…. Me and Lorenzo Fertitta will sit down and figure out a game plan for the next 10 years, and we’ll execute it. So, is 10 years enough time to make this the biggest sport in the world? Hell, yeah.”
– Dana White via the Las Vegas Sun
The sport’s growth is fantastic and as someone who deeply loves MMA it still blows my mind to see the PPV buy numbers. However, I can’t ever see MMA ever being much more than a niche sport. That isn’t to say that the growth will die off entirely. But I don’t think we’ll ever see MMA have the mass appeal in America of a sport like football or baseball and I don’t see it having the global appeal of soccer.
This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just that I think it’s unrealistic to pretend that we’re on our way to a world dominated by MMA and far too many fans of the sport are gullible enough to buy into it as more than just typical Dana media work.