Honestly, this is just a bad idea. If the hip show was stupid fun (and mostly stupid) and tag team MMA is an almost entirely terrible idea then Team Fighting Championships from Poland has to rank right up there with Dog Brothers in terms of all time terrible MMA ideas. Take two teams of four or five fighters and a ref for every supposed “pairing,” put them all in one big open ring and let them wail on eachother until one team loses. Of course, the team doesn’t lose all at once, but one at a time and each time one fighter gets knocked out or submitted, that frees the winning fighter to go help one of his teammates. You can probably see where this is going…
Eventually, if one team is really overmatched, as in the video above, you end up with three or four guys just wailing on some dude while he cowers on the mat. Because sports, that’s why. According to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney(where I ran across this video) rules of TFC harken back to a simpler time in MMA: No throat strikes, No groin strikes, no biting, no spitting (notice No gouging wasn’t in there) and that’s it, everything else is fair game.
I love the feel of classic MMA, when there were effectively no rules and it was a straight matching of style vs. style. The action and storylines of a one night tournament. All of these things were great in their time, but they’re also things that had to be moved on from, because at some point, as fighters became much, much more skilled, someone was probably going to get seriously injured or killed. Every now and then, some small organization attempts to recapture that initial MMA magic and it’s usually by doing something stupid and dangerous. This may be the very pinnacle in that pantheon of bad MMA promotion ideas.