As you may have read Paramount recently acquired the exclusive rights to broadcast almost all UFC events for some adbsurd amount of money in the many billions of dollars.
Today is the first time that they will actually be using this and at least for the time being, the pay-per-view model that UFC has been using for forever is being ditched. I never personally actually paid for it as I would always go to a bar that would have it on - and pay an astronomical amount of money for the rights to do so - or I would watch it on some dodgy streaming site that has a million pop up ads.
Paramount will drastically change the format although to some degree UFC and their parent company Zuffa will maintain a great deal of creative control. Lots of things could get better, and lots of things could get worse because of this deal.
Paramount is of course a paid streaming service, and they are likely hoping that this 7.7 billion dollar deal will increase their subscriber base. Sine each UFC event was around $60 and a subscription to Paramount costs substantially less than that, the will almost certainly see an uptick in memberships. The rights to broadcast the events at a bar though, will likely still have an increased cost associated with them. I have no idea how this works or who is actually checking, but someone is because the bar owners I know have told me that they had to pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to have the rights to play the events in public.
Paramount though, has a lot of money to make back before they can turn a profit on this, and this is where things could start to go horribly wrong. Unless they get something like 500 million additional subscribers from this deal, which is incredibly unlikely, the broadcast alone will not make them money and the obvious thing to do in order to supplement this is going to be paid advertising.
One thing that I have always kind of enjoyed about UFC PPV events rather than the ones that were on ESPN or Fox is that they never had commercials. Sure, there were sponsors on the ring and the announcers would talk about a movie and a sponsor every now and then, but we were not subjected to Burger King or whoever else ads between fights. This could change a great deal if they need to make more money. Although Paramount is indeed a paid subscription that traditionally has no ads, this could change when we are talking about sporting events.
If you watch any US sports on TV you are already aware of the obscene amount of commercials viewers are subjected to to the point where in the past the NBA had built in "TV timeouts" to make space for commercials to be broadcast at pre-set times.
I have long said that all sports are about making money, not about the sport themselves. The organizers will get all pumped about the sport itself but the people pulling the strings behind the scenes may not even enjoy the sport at all and are simply in it for the potentially huge amount of money that it can bring in. I recall when some brothers from Texas bought an English Premiere League team, I think it was Manchester United, and openly admitted that they were not even all that familiar with the rules. They were just in it to make billions, which they did.
With Paramount getting involved they do in fact have an opportunity to bring the events to more eyes and also get more people watching their shows, which I have seen a few of and think are pretty good. The shows never have ads but I can see them getting greedy with UFC out of necessity. $7.7 billion is a large stack of cash, and they are going to need to make this back one way or another. They are no dummies and may have had this plan in the books already.
I already feel like UFC events are too long but if we end up getting an additional say, half an hour of ads, it could become unbearable.
Rigged matchups
Another thing that could happen, and already is happening, is that deserving fighters could get leap-frogged in lieu of more marketable names. Paddy Pimblett and Justin Gaethje are fighting for an interim title today, and the UFC made this fight while completely ignoring the truly highest rated fighter in the category Armen Sargsyan.
While I do agree with Paramount that this fight is far more eye-catching than Sargsyan vs Charles Oliveira putting the number 4 and 5 ranked fighters in the Lightweight division up for a title headliners makes exactly zero sense. It is also very unfair for the fighters who have sweat and bled to actually deserve this title shot.
We can expect this tradition to continue and more and more fighters are going to start to focus on doing things to boost their social media "score" and the amount of followers that they have, rather than focusing on being the best fighters. Anyone who is not a native English speaker is automatically at a huge disadvantage.
Fighter pay could, and likely will, drop
UFC already has a lot of fighters rightfully claiming that they are underpaid, and with the elimination of the pay-per-view revenue that was shared with fighters who were on the card, this salary is expected to drop even more. The UFC pretends to care about the fighters, but again, they are in it for the money. Now that we have another set of bosses in the people running Paramount also at the helm, we can expect the treatment and compensation of the fighters to not be a priority for the masters. On the flip side of all of this, the owners do have a very solid point when they have indirectly stated "if you don't like it, there's the door." UFC is not the only game in town, but they are by far the largest and anyone that leaves for other promotions will take an even bigger hit as far as paydays are concerned.
For me these are all potentially really big problems and from a purely selfish point of view I would really hate to see the events made longer so that we have to sit through more and more commercials on a streaming service that people are paying for. Paramount already has an "ad free" subscription tier that is a bit higher than the one with ads, but will they violate this when it comes to UFC events? They too will have the authority to tell people "there's the door" if they don't like it, because you have no choice but to go through Paramount if you want to watch the events.
Today will be a real showcase in how Paramount intends to run this thing and I really hope they don't let us all down. I have not enjoyed how UFC has been managing the promotion for years and unfortunately I feel like this deal has a lot more ways to make things worse than it does to make it better.
We are all going to find out in just a few hours though.