UFC 301 was always going to be a letdown after UFC 300.
Let’s face it, the UFC threw everything they had to put together UFC 300 and UFC 301 was the leftovers, plus Jose Aldo.
Going in, fan sentiment was skeptical, at best.
The lethal combination of high prices, unappealing cards and poor streaming service has got to be driving fans to the illegal streams in droves.
As for me, I didn’t watch a minute of the fucking thing live. I had a funeral and a wake to attend.
Catching up (and frankly fast-forwarding through a ton of the fights) today, I only have two things to say about the card:
The UFC should not have gutted men’s flyweight if they’re going to be headlining cards with it
Jose Aldo is awesome but his kind won’t come again (and neither will Matt Brown’s)
The UFC has always had deeply ambivalent feelings about the men’s 125 pound division. As a result they’ve pretty much gutted it more than once. This leads to Steve Erceg being in a PPV main event three fights into his UFC career.
No one thinks this is a good idea. The UFC just doesn’t give a shit. They get paid the same by ESPN whether the UFC sells big or sells little.
One of my favorite MMA Twitter follows, @SoozieCuzie, summed up the weakness of the UFC 301 card as a buying proposition:
She also pointed out the difficulty ESPN+ even had delivering the subpar offering to paying customers.
Luke Thomas picked up the torch.
The UFC and ESPN+ are both deep into a process Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.”
HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Substitute “sports entertainment content providers” for “platforms” and you’ve got the story of Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor/TKO in a nutshell.
Ari is right at the transition from abusing customers/fans to abusing business customers/ESPN+. It’s a pretty sweet spot and presents many opportunities for short-term profiteering at Disney’s expense.
And Bob Iger is too busy in bidding wars for the NBA and NFL to pay too much attention to what’s going on with the UFC deal.
Jose Aldo’s magic time machine
It was cool to see Jose Aldo utterly dominate Jonathan Martinez in the co-main event. Martinez has been on a run of winning fights with vicious leg kick TKOs so it was reasonable for Aldo fans to fear that the old lion was being fed with a young lion.
But the Featherweight GOAT showed that Martinez has a long way to go to be competitive with the best in the division and Aldo still has plenty left in the tank.
It was also cool for us old-timers to see Urijah Faber and Aldo hug it out in the locker room before the bout.
Saturday night also saw UFC legend Matt Brown announce his retirement.
Frankly I don’t expect we’ll see the likes of either Aldo or Brown in the UFC any time soon. The locking in of low low pay levels by the recent class-action settlement means the UFC won’t attract truly ambitious athletes.
And the generic “Guys Fighting” approach encouraged by the throwing slop to the streaming suckers business model means even the most talented and gutsiest fighters won’t be marketed well enough to develop the kind of fan loyalty that Aldo and Brown created in their 2000s and 2010s UFC careers.
"Ari is right at the transition from abusing customers/fans to abusing business customers/ESPN+. It’s a pretty sweet spot and presents many opportunities for short-term profiteering at Disney’s expense."
Can someone please elaborate on how the UFC is exploiting Disney?