UFC's global aspirations complicated by Elon Musk vs. Brazil

UFC is uniquely vulnerable to geopolitical turmoil because of how international their exposure is.

After months of back-and-forth brinksmanship, Alexandre de Moraes — the Brazilian minister of the Supreme Federal Court — has blocked X.com (formerly Twitter). He has threatened any Brazilian using a VPN to get around the block with huge fines.

Ari Emanuel’s friend is swimming in some deep waters right now and they’re not in Mykonos.

The TL;DR version of events is this: Brazil wants X to ban 7 accounts and Elon Musk doesn’t want to. Elon shut down his offices in Brazil after the judge threatened to start arresting people. The judge responded by blocking X nationally (there were also some measures taken against other Musk owned companies like Starlink).

Brazil is Twitter’s fourth-largest market.

Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Brendan Carr — a Trump appointee to the Federal Communications Commission — have made some impassioned arguments opposing the ban on free speech grounds. Greenwald even points out that Brazil’s ruling left-wing party still uses the platform for political purposes.

Many Brazilian fighters, past and present, rely on Twitter to communicate to the world. A lot of veteran Brazilian MMA writers find their voices silenced as well.

I have to agree that this situation is a serious blow to free speech and open international communications and those liberals who are cheering it on because they hate Elon Musk are missing the bigger picture.

Having said that, the politics are a bit more complicated than Musk and his simps make them out to be.

Ryan Broderick brought some useful perspective to the politics of the situation:

Now that we know the exact accounts that were ordered to be suspended, it’s extremely clear why Musk was comfortable sacrificing Brazilian users to keep them. They included Marcos Ribeiro do Val, a senator that’s been investigated for his role in Brazil’s 2023 insurrection, pro-Bolsonaro influencer Ednardo Davila Mello Raposo, and Paola Da Silva Daniel, the wife of Daniel Silveira, a former military police officer and state deputy that has been arrested several times for threatening supreme court ministers.

It should go without saying that if former Brazilian president and far-right COVID magnet Jair Bolsonaro was still in power and asking for leftist accounts to be suspended, Musk would have been more than happy to oblige. In fact, we know this because X restricted content on the request of the Turkish government in 2023 and complied with a government order to block accounts in India in 2024.

World governments are cleaving sections of the Internet into different speech and regulatory standards. Directives from judges. Australia’s eSafety commissioner going after Twitter with take down orders. France arresting “speech” tycoon Pavel Durov of Telegram. Former American politicians beckoning an arrest of Elon himself.

Let’s talk about how this turmoil impacts the UFC a little bit.

Paulo Costa, one of many UFC fighters who support Brazil’s right-wing former President Bolsonaro, made himself the face of the UFC on this issue with a series of Tweets.

Following an obscenity and slur-laced response to American actor Mark Ruffalo, Costa said the fines were too high and he’d be leaving the platform, but soon after he was back:

Given the UFC’s hard swing to the political right in the Endeavor era, I’d expect most UFC fans and fighters to back Musk in this deal.

But I doubt that Dana White, Mark Shapiro, or Ari Emanuel will take an official position. That’s because this kind of political fighting is bad for business, especially if you are fishing for government contracts.

It’s certainly bad for Elon’s business:

Brazil has historically been one of the most important international markets for the promotion. The UFC has held 39 events there in the Zuffa and Endeavor eras although only three of those cards were post-COVID.

In the 2010s when the promotion featured Brazilians champions like Anderson Silva, Jose Aldo, Shogun Rua, Minotauro Noguiera, and Amanda Nunes, they even had a broadcast deal with Globo TV, the country’s biggest broadcast network.

Those glory days are gone. Now we’ve only got two Brazilian champs and the much smaller Band TV has replaced Globo as the UFC’s broadcast partner. Nonetheless, Brazil remains an important market for the UFC — especially for female fighters.

And international expansion is a key part of the UFC’s strategy. As ESPN reported in 2021:

"Our goal is to open the sport everywhere," UFC president Dana White said.

Through 2009, the UFC held events in just seven countries outside of the United States. Since 2010, UFC events have been held in 19 different countries, and the goal is to hold 20 events per year outside of the U.S. Global expansion has resulted in 10 of the 12 UFC championship belts being worn by fighters who were born outside of the U.S.

"We're still a very young sport," White said. "And who else as young as us has been able to make a global impact the way that we have? I'd say nobody."

At the time, the UFC was focused on France, Mexico, West Africa, and China as growth targets. Since then, they’ve lost their French and African champs (although they’ve just added a South African champ) and their current attempt to capture attention in Mexico is flopping badly.

Australia and the UK are still reasonably strong markets for them. However, they have never landed the perfect TV partner in Britain. As a result, even when that country hosts a live UFC card it takes place in the wee early hours of the morning to be perfectly timed for the American pay-per-view market.

Canada was a huge market in the days of Georges St-Pierre, but has been a low priority lately. UFC is returning to Edmonton in November with a Fight Night level card.

The UFC infamously gave up on Japan after buying out PRIDE and failing to break into the market. (Zach Arnold will have an update on the state of MMA in Japan in Thursday’s newsletter for our paid subscribers).

The point is, even with a sport like MMA that is seemingly portable and of universal appeal, international sports markets are hard to break into and even harder to maintain.

We’re already witnessing dead silence from the NFL in regards to their upcoming Eagles/Packers game in São Paulo. The Park Avenue office is taking a page out of the NBA playbook on China. The NFL game will air on Peacock. What will or will not be said by the broadcasting crew? How will NFL media writers be able to communicate from the arena with Twitter banned?

It seems like the only people from the NFL communicating about Brazil are now finding themselves on the wrong end of an apology.

As the global geo-political situation continues to devolve on multiple fronts, it will be harder and harder for the UFC to navigate choppy international waters. This bullshit between Elon Musk and Brazil isn’t helping.

What makes the 2024 combat sports landscape such a complicated mess is that world governments and contractors are promoters. The two biggest promoters of all are the UFC (via Wall Street/UAE through Silver Lake & Mubadala) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As Zach recently said, it’s like watching Airbus and Boeing. Government sharks are navigating turbulent and ever-changing waters.

We’ve already experienced public outrage over the UFC’s on-again, off-again flag policy. Now we’re entering into a period of debate over the rules of engagement for global communication.

For a major country with so much history and potential like Brazil, losing unfettered communication to the world via Twitter is a loss. It’s an even greater loss for the combat sports industry and the fans who support it.