BTG 104 - Is MMA for the rich?

Hello and welcome to Breaking the Guard. We just had the Noce of UFC, which is uh supposed to be a celebration of the Mexican culture because it's Hispanic Heritage Month starting today or whatever. But one of the things I found interesting was the average ticket price to watch this UFC in the sphere was over $1,000 for general admission any seat which brings a question is the UFC becoming a sport for the bgeoisi for the the for the upper class because man that's pricey right uh and one has to wonder like, are we really getting a good value for this now? And it just seems kind of insane. Even the pay-per-view, like honestly, this card didn't really excite me much. I didn't buy the pay-per-view. and watch it cuz it was like $90 I think now to even get the pay-per-view which I mean I know we're going through inflation and all this other stuff but Jesus you know like it's pricey to be an MMA fan nowadays and if you're trying to watch all the events and stay up to date like forget even the inerson prices which now seem you know out of reach for most people right you know I mean you have to consider that if you're not in the city where the event is, you have to travel, you have to get a hotel, you know, you're going to have to Uber, rent a car, and then you're paying, you know, $1,000 seats for you and maybe a few family members. That's not your your common person is not going to be able to do that. You know, if you're like middle class or, you know, god forbid, lower class, like there's no way you're going to be able to afford to attend an inerson event anymore. And that isn't saying like, "Oh, the UFC is doing bad strategy." They had their biggest gate to date at this event. Uh, apparently saying it was close to sold out or sold out. Uh, I believe there was like 13,000 seats sold or something like that. So, you can imagine that, you know, average price of one grand a pop. They they did pretty well there. However, it does seem that it's now something that's not for the ordinary fan to be able to go watch in person. Like I said, it's not nec it's probably a good problem to have if you're the UFC, which is that you want to any business would want to cater to a higher ticket audience, right? Why would I want to sell $1 tickets if I could sell $1,000 tickets? of course sell as thousand dollar tickets but even the athome option has which is would be like you know the budget choice for watching and be able to support the sport is also becoming more and more prohibitive. It's one thing if there was UFC's once every couple months like it was back in the day and I know I've said this many a time but it's worth reiterating in my opinion uh that yeah okay I can drop you know 80 bucks for a pay-per-view but when you have you know two or maybe even three pay-per-views in a in a month although I think it's usually one or two now you're you're starting do. Well, that's $180 for two events. And uh if you're kind of a loner like I am and I don't really want to have like house parties all the time, you know, I'm sure you can make it work if you you get a bunch of people in. You can split cost if you really wanted to. It just is becoming a bit more price prohibitive. And I also wonder, are the athletes really getting the benefits of these raised prices? because I don't think they are. I think the UFC is pocketing a lot more for these higher ticket items and the athletes are still getting this very very very small trickle down effect that's not really doing anything. So, that's a little uh disconcerting to me. And I think it does make it harder for the old school guys like I'm one of them like to really want to participate more in this when I feel like everything's being price couched and it's not rewarding the fighters, you know? Uh nowadays, it has to be a really really good card for me to want to tune in on. And uh otherwise even the fight nights which are free and I have UFC fight pass and I have you know the flow grappling I have all these things but I don't really tune into them all the time. Like I usually watch some of the main event fights or anything that that draws my interest. So, I think the overabundance of the events kind of waters it down a bit for me because it's just what I call it the strip club effect where if you've been to a strip club before, at least for me, after like 10 minutes, you're kind of desensitized, you know, because once you see one boob and you see 30 boobs, like, okay, they all, you know, it's not really doing anything different, right? Like, I've had enough of this. And in the fight world, it's quite like that, you know? Like and that's why I hate fight cards that are like 20 fights deep. And I know a lot of like local shows, grappling events and stuff like that, they can they tend to do that. And I understand the marketing strategy behind it. The more schools and teams they could bring in and put on a spot on a card, they're going to draw all their audiences, which is going to make it easier to sell. But from a spectator point of view, it's it's so long to see 20 matches back to back, especially when we're talking about one match each like an MMA card is. Like an Emmy card will have like 15 fights or 18 fights and you I know when we're coaching them, I normally want to be one of the first guys so I can just get in and out, you know? I don't want to watch and be there for like six hours of fights. Like I I lost the novelty, right? So, it's the it's the same type of deal. I don't want to be there and watching all these fights. And that's why some people I think when they see uh fights on pay-per-view and they watch the prelims like how come nobody's there like you bought these very expensive tickets. It's because of that. I think on at home it's a little easier to deal with because I can go and get something to eat, grab some snacks. I'm not kind of stuck and you're more comfortable at home. There's the comfort at an arena is not really the same. What you're paying for in the arena is the a is the atmosphere. It's different. When the crowd pops, you really feel it, right? But other than that, the comfort is way down. You know, you if you want to go to the bathroom and grab yourself a snack, you're paying like $10 for a bottle of water, whatnot. So, uh, and your viewing angle is not going to be good as it is at home. It's just the honest truth. So I I don't know. I think now a lot of the the UFC's as far as a value proposition is more just to be seen if you're going to be paying for these crazy seats, right? Like I don't know. I think or maybe I'm just old and I'm a kromagin and I'm not just I I'm not finding the the excuses to go out. I mean personally I I rather go out anyways. I don't like going out to eat. I feel like I can make food better at home, much more affordable, and more importantly, more delicious. So, I don't know. But it would be nice if the pay-per-view prices would drop down a bit more. I would say like if they were back, man, I mean, when we're late 90s, early 2000s, they were like 30 $40 pay-per-views and they just have been moving up up up pretty fast. So, I think if we drop back down to the $60 range, that would be a lot better. Um, just it seems like it would be a lot easier to for me to stomach taking multiple pay-per-views, even ones that I'm not particularly interested in, but I just want to be a student of the sport and watch them more. But like, you know, $90 pops, I'm like, "Ah, I I can live without this one, you know, and I'll just watch the clips on Instagram and and get what I need to get from it." Or once they throw them up in UFC fight pass, I'll have access to it either way. So, just seems to me like they're kind of pricing a good segment of the people out, especially when you consider that martial arts, well, at least when I was coming up, it wasn't a rich people sport. It was more of a poverty sport, right? Like boxing is definitely a poverty sport. Very low equipment cost. Boxing gloves, hand wraps, mouthpiece, headgear, you know, you could get all these things for less than 100 bucks if you really wanted to. And if you trained at a local, you know, gym, you you would even like your fees would be minimal. Now everything has stepped up. And I can speak from both ends because I'm a martial arts school owner and prices have gone up significantly. So not only you know I mean actually our prices as far as charging members hasn't really shifted that much in comparison to them the the prices and fees of running the business has like one of the things that happened recently that really sucked is martial arts insurance prices have skyrocketed and we can thank our our jiu-jitsu celebrity Henry Gracie for that in no small part. I'm sure that his hand in uh that court case for that front flip, which like I said, I think was not entirely just, has caused insurance companies to freak out a bit more. And uh it seems to have because I don't think we've ever had a claim in our gym. And I think we are the insurance rates went threefold maybe four-fold times more which is no small cost you know in addition to all the other things as far as like if you own a space you know or in case we're leasing a space or that that price has gone up a lot since we've started. So of course that's kind of getting passed down to the customer a bit. It's unavoidable. Um, but you know, as far as being a student, it our prices hasn't really changed all that much. It's not even double or close to that. whereas our fees have probably close to double what they used to be for running the business which uh I mean ideally I want to try to as a business owners and particularly just from value I want to help as many people as possible. Uh but at the same time I can't just give dollar memberships away because then I wouldn't have enough space to help the people that uh to help anybody really. it just wouldn't be enough space and I would probably go bankrupt pretty fast. So, there's got to be a fair compromise as far as like how much we can bill versus how much uh we can re pay our staff and then also have a a fair profit as well. So, when I talk about the UFC, I feel like they're not paying their staff. And it's funny because technically the fighters are not their staff. They're not employees. They're all contractors and this is kind of a way that they get around the compensation because Dana goes in a lot of interviews I've seen him on. He talks about how he loves his team. He takes the best care of his team. He rewards his team and he's not lying. The problem is the fighters are not his team. He's talking about, you know, the people behind the scenes, the the production crew and, you know, the the the media people, the marketing, the people who actually are employed by UFC. The actual talent, the contractors are not his team. So, that's not who he's talking about. So, if you ever heard Dana in an interview talking about how important it is taking care of people, it's not his fighters, right? Uh because they're not his technically, right? they're just contractors. And I think at this stage in the game, it's very disingenuous that relationship, right? Because if you are contracted with the UFC, it's not like you really get to choose where you could fight, what sponsors you can uh bring in. Um like these are all controlled by them, you know. Of course, they they can get sponsors outside of the UFC and whatnot, but they're really flirting like in this little gray area, and I feel like the particularly there it's a lot more monopolistic than I think it should be. And I I don't think people I'm not the only one complaining about this, obviously. I mean, Craig Jones did a whole thing on this basically, and that's why he started CGI in the grappling world. Um, but I think if the UFC was paying out everybody fairly, and by fairly we can just say compared to other professional sports with big leagues, I think now we can say the UFC is a mainstream sport, right? It's not a fringe niched thing that only a few people are aware about. Everybody knows the UFC now. Obviously, if they're charging these high ticket prices, we're only uh you know, celebrities are going in to be able to get front row seats. It's mainstream now. You got guys like uh Shauna Ali and uh Conor McGregor. These are now household names. They're they're celebrities in their own right. So, these are the probably those guys are the only people that are getting paid really well. And it's not because they were good fighters, it's because they were good marketers and good promoters. But not all your athletes are are that way. And I feel like in other sports like in the NFL, NBA, you know, NHL, they get paid very well. There's, you know, football players that you've never heard of that are able to retire with millions of dollars in the bank and they never had were featured in commercials or anything like that. they were just good football players and they did the job right and the job was being a football player and you know whether that's a defensive lineman or whatever the case may be and MMA is not has been built in a way to try to distinguish it from other sports where it's you like you have to market yourself you know if you want to be well compensated and I feel like these are different it's true of course everything in life if you know how to market yourself you're going to be much more successful and you know kudos to you, right? But it shouldn't be every fighter's responsibility to be the ultimate marketer because the reality is they're not going to be. The guys who, you know, are very clever and they've put the time in and they know how to market themselves, uh, are going to get better rewards and they should. But if you're not a guy that does that, but you're an an amazingly talented fighter and in fact, like rather than focus on marketing, you just focus everything on your fighting ability. And so basically, you max out fighting ability and you kind of uh didn't invest any time in your marketing. You shouldn't be punished for that, right? Maybe you don't get rewarded as much as other people do, but you should still be rewarded for being the best fighter on the planet. I mean, that's really what we're looking for from a spectator point of view. So, I find it odd, right? And I know this is an old stat. I wonder what it was now, but I know I believe that most professional sports pay around 50% of their of their gross to athlete payroll where the UFC was like 19%. You know, so you're talking about like almost two and a half more than two and a half times below other professional sports. So if we can get that number to be more or less even, I think then more people, including myself, would be quiet about this. It's like, okay, like they have a contracted relationship. They're doing whatever they're doing, but they're on par with everybody else for the amount of fame that they have, right? So, I don't know. That's my take on it. I I always want to see the fighters be rewarded more, but I wouldn't rely on that. If you're a fighter, you should be marketing yourself because that's the reality of the world and you're going to get more uh opportunities that way. I would say also if you do acrew a certain amount of and nowadays you don't really need to because there's agents and stuff you should really be leaning on the agent then if you're not going to be the guy that's going to push yourself and do all the social media posting get somebody to do it for you right it might not be as good but it's going to be a lot better than n nothing right anyhow that's all I got for you guys uh hope you guys had a great week and uh I'm going to be putting up I actually just put up a a course on bottom mounts on the site on davidmma.com. So, um that one's covering escapes, of course, reversals, some submissions you can hit off your back, and also how to deal with like spots that people can get stuck in like a high mount or a low mount. So, you can go ahead check it out now. That's available for all members of the site. If you're not a member, it's 20 bucks a month. Um and you will get access to all the courses now. Uh well most of the courses rather I think like 30 of them out of the 37 courses made by other instructors other than myself. You have to purchase on the shop there. But all my courses are available under the member plan which includes my jiu-jitsu camps and all my legacy courses like Kimora trap system for headlock series all that stuff in the membership. So you can check that out. By the way, if you have ideas for then this course I made wasn't my idea. Somebody posted on the forum uh and I made it two days later, right? So, if you ask, you shall receive, you know? So, if you guys have uh things that you would like to learn from me or you know, stuff you want me to talk about on the podcast or make articles on, if you post them on the forum, I'll be happy to address them. And uh the forum access right now is restricted to subscribers and members. If you're none of those, you can still submit them. Just email me at daviddavidmma.com and I'll be happy to address those as well. I like catering my uh offerings towards preferential towards people that are are paying, right? Because they're the ones that going to be supporting the platform. But uh uh short of that, the people that are watching some of my free content like the podcasts, I would definitely I want to cater to the audience more than anything, not just to what I want to talk about. Anyhow, wish you guys a wonderful day and I'll see you all next