I have suspected for a long time that certain participants in MMA bouts are selected because of how popular they are and perhaps even moreso about how popular their social media is. I have a relative who is involved in the sports industry and even though she is a relatively minor person in that field, she "has a guy" that creates and maintains her social media for her, because this is, according to her, the most important part of her brand.
That is what I suspect of UFC and all the other promotions that exist out there. The fights that we get to see aren't necessarily the people who are the best suited for the job at hand, but they are the people that are most likely to get people into seats at events and watching the fights on TV. They are hype machines, and can make people watch a fight by pushing it on their own Twitter, IG, and FB feeds.
Often these fights are completely undeserved based on their track-record in the industry and they do not deserve to be there.
One of the earliest versions of this that I can think of would be any Championship fight that Chael Sonnen received and especially his trilogy vs Anderson Silva. At that time Chael was kind of a journeyman in that he was losing a lot of fights as well and he went on a slight hot streak of a couple of wins in a row and then all of a sudden got thrust into the championship picture despite being more than 10 places out of number one. How did this happen? Well it was because he had a mouth on him, was wildly entertaining on the microphone, and had a rabid social media following. When the fight did happen there was so much interest in it to the point that people tended to forget that Silva was basically indestructible at that point. Silva destroyed him in the fight yet there was enough hype created during this that they brought the duo back twice more just for the hell of it. The last one was boxing but and it was more lame than the MMA fights but it got the intended results, people tuned in to watch it.
Then there is the case of Jake Paul. He and his brother were some of the most successful YouTubers of all time and pivoted this into turning themselves into whatever they wanted to be. Jake Paul just wanted to be a boxer so now he is. Logan Paul tried his hand a boxing but is now a well-paid WWE superstar. Neither of these guys went the traditional path of getting there but were able to put butts into seats because they were already famous. They just waltzed in and didn't really put in the years of work that most people do in order to get a seat at the table.
Jake was better at this than Logan and as someone that has watched every single one of his fights, I can tell you that while I wouldn't want to scrap with the guy, there is a real reason why he doesn't do a lot of fighting of actual active boxers. His style is boring and rather ineffective and his opponents are hand-selected by how likely they are to lose to him. This could all change later this year and if Joshua does make him go to sleep we might feel like we finally got our revenge, but in that time Jake has already made hundreds of millions of dollars that he mostly didn't deserve... why? Because of social media.
I was reading an article that was specifically about MMA where several fighters have indicated that getting to trending on social media is far more important than actually being good at fighting. Derrick Lewis said something funny after a minor win when he was asked a question by Joe Rogan and Lewis didn't answer the question but instead said "my balls are hot" and then got 2 million social media followers in the next 24 hours.
Lewis would later be offered a title fight that he definitely didn't deserve, would lose said fight badly as well because he never should have been there in the first place.
I will admit that one of my favorite fighters is one of my favorite fighters purely because of his targeted advertising of sorts that always makes fighting news. His name is Colby Covington and he always loses when it matters most. He has been thrice propelled to fights that he probably didn't deserve because of his mouth and the persona that he created with his "MR. USA" character that has been a part of pro-wrestling for years.
Covington has admitted that he does the ultra-patriotic heel character because it gets him attention and this attention and a massive social media presence gets him big fights with big purses. He may not be the "real" headliner in most of his fights but every fight that he is in is normally the main reason why people are tuning in. I'm not saying he is a bad fighter, he definitely is not, but a great deal of the reason why he is so heavily featured is because he is entertaining outside of the Octagon. Was/is he super partriotic? Is he seriously conservative? is he even a loud-mouthed jerk? It's tough to say but in the end he got big paydays and big fights despite having a checkered past with plenty of losses in it.
Stipe Miocic came forward recently to say that he was denied a championship fight and directly told by Dana White that maybe he can have a title fight once he becomes more popular. Johny Hendricks was repeatedly told the same thing and once "Big Rig" actually did acquire some fame, it is suspected that he was robbed of a title win over Georges St. Pierre because GSP was one of the most famous athletes MMA has ever known.
At the end of the day UFC and all other sports are a business and on the business end of things they need their fighters to be able to put people into arenas and need them to be watching on TV. This is easier to do when the fighters are struggling to maintain an online presence that does the advertising for the promotion in question. Therefore, a lot of these guys and in particular the ones where English is not their native language, now are forced to hire some sort of social media engineer.
This is why we end up with a bunch of boring and lopsided fights if you ask me and is the reason why we see certain people who go from zero to hero in half a year because they say something interesting on the microphone.
Take a look at this following scenario the next time you watch a UFC event. Wait for Joe Rogan to interview someone after a fight and see if the fighter even bothers to answer the questions that Joe asks. They tend not to because they are too busy looking for a viral sound byte to get the crowd riled up and get them to trending on socials. I've always found that annoying but that is just the way the industry is right now.