The UFC was founded in 1993 by Campbell McLaren, Rorion Gracie, Art Davie, Bob Meyrowitz, and David Isaacs. The league was sold to ZUFFA in 2001, and sold again to WEM-IMG in 2016 for 4 billion dollars, the largest sale in sports history. Now McLaren has done Jiu-Jitsu on the UFC, not going head to head directly, but instead focusing with leverage on an area of weakness. His Combate Americas builds Latino fighting champions and serves Hispanic fans, one of the world’s most avid groups of combat sports enthusiasts.
On Saturday McLaren Copa Combate will broadcast live on NBCUniversal’s Telemundo network and on NBCSN, from Cancun, Mexico on Saturday, Nov. 11, at 11:30 p.m. ET. There will be Spanish and English language broadcasts.
The event is headlined by an epic, one-night, eight-man bantamweight tournament that will award its winner a grand prize of $100,000. It takes place on the 24th anniversary of UFC 1, which was also headlined by a one-night, eight-man tournament.
In doing Copa Combate, what I wanted to do was do a soccer-style tournament, the way Copa Americas is, sort of the world cup, and allow for a number of countries in North and South America and Spain in Europe to be represented explained McLaren, as transcribed by Derek Helling for FanSided. …the first UFC tournament was in a lot of ways country vs. country too, but there was really no, it wasn’t MMA, the arts had not been mixed in UFC 1…If you look at the first one, it really is an international tournament. It’s style vs. style, but it really comes down to cultures or countries being represented. So this is a direct connection to Copa Combate which is just straight up U.S. vs. Mexico vs. Puerto Rico vs. Spain vs. Columbia vs. Argentina vs. Peru so in a lot of ways it really is the same thing, but now the arts have been mixed. So you no longer represent a country with a particular martial art because MMA is mixed martial arts.
We really emphasized the fact that we are offering a new style of MMA, a Hispanic style, that I think is more aggressive, less ground game, more exciting, more action, more finishes, 81 percent of finishes in Combate as opposed to the UFC where it’s 51 percent. So I think it’s a different style of MMA. I say it jokingly but in all seriousness, in the U.S., salsa outsells ketchup because more people like the Spanish flavor. I think Combate is like that. I think we have a really distinct Hispanic flavor…My guys all started as boxers. They learned jiu-jitsu. They learned the grappling skills. They already know how to punch. Their prime techniques are punching and they added the ground game. That just makes it much more active and I think more entertaining fight, maybe less technical for the hardcore fans, I think more entertaining for new fans.
I think MMA is now a global entity. In some ways, I know it sounds crazy, we are surpassing the UFC in a lot of places. Not the U.S … What I’m hearing is that the UFC is probably going to slice and dice their rights to get to the numbers that they need to get to, that there’s not one broadcaster that can own the UFC internationally and get them to the dollar amount they want. I have heard that they may even be slicing the slices into slices. There are some small entities that have some rights, like OTT rights in Eastern Europe, that they may sell off. You do that when you can’t get your price from one big source. There’s also a rumor that may shutter Fight Pass and move everything to Fox’s OTT platform.
Don’t confuse that strategy with anything that looks like failure. They wanted $450 million a year. That’s a big number. $100 million is a big number. All this is, is a business view, an endeavor, the backers who bought the UFC, they have a big market, they borrowed a lot of money to buy the joint and now they have to get a lot of money back. So it’s not that this should in any way show that the UFC is struggling, that I would say, if you can command those sort of numbers, that’s pretty successful in anything. I think the only thing is that the TV industry is changing. So the only thing that is really holding up in terms of value is live sports. The traditional sports are trending down, not soccer, the UFC is not. They are in a pretty interesting position. I think to a great extent they are defining what sports will look like for the rest of the decade and maybe into the next. It’s pretty interesting. I’m on the sidelines cheering. I want them to get so much money the buyers get carpal tunnel from writing the checks. I think the UFC is worth it. From a global point of view, if they are worth $450 million for TV rights, and I’m in 21 countries that they don’t serve well, I think I’m worth $250 million. So I’m pretty happy. I think it’s all good and it’s good for the sport. Let them pay. 24 years ago they [broadcasting companies] didn’t show any respect. Now they have to pay.
We own all of our content. We are doing deals around the world. We are doubling the UFC’s ratings in Spain. We are doing a multiple of 10 times the ratings in Mexico. We are going on in Columbia, I know we are going to kick their asses there. From a business point of view, we are focused on the 21 Spanish-speaking countries. They have been abandoned by the UFC as the UFC has focused on Russia and China. We have Hispanic fighters because we celebrate Spanish style and we are salsa to UFC’s ketchup. I don’t even think of the UFC as a competitor anymore. I think our top competitor is really eSports. If you look at the average age of a UFC fan it’s 47. My average age is 27. We’re the millennial sport.
This is the first Copa Combate. The next one we are planning in Columbia. We are trying to find cool places to do it that don’t give any country or fighter a hometown advantage … So what we want to do is find like world resorts, I don’t want to go to any one place that gives any one fighter a hometown advantage. It has to be a world-class place and it should be a fun place to go to … We are going to do this once a year. We are probably going to have different bouts in order to determine who will represent the country next time. I think that’s a fun way to do it. My guys are younger and newer, they don’t have the career track record, and we need to establish the fact that they are worthy of representing their country, so we will probably have a couple of bouts to determine who represents which country.
The company is growing so fast, we are about two and a half years ahead of schedule from what we had planned out. The growth of our company is nothing short of phenomenal and our TV distribution rivals the UFC and surpasses the UFC in terms of ratings in the Spanish-speaking countries. I think the next year is going to be off the hook, just nuts, we start off again Jan. 5 in Mexico City, we are going to be in Columbia, we have an event planned for Spain, we are potentially, this is not announced but I will float it out there, we are going to be weekly on Telemundo next year. So there is a lot happening, a lot of new countries, a lot of new fights, looking at our projections and our business plans, we are about two and a half years ahead of where we thought we would be, so it’s just fantastic success, and I think that we have had that success because we present a different point of view. We are salsa while everyone else is ketchup. We really are. It’s different. You can see it, you can taste it, you can feel it. There’s a ton of MMA, and the UFC is old style MMA is the best. If you want old style MMA, watch the UFC, it’s been around 24 years. If you want something new, something different, watch Copa.
The $100,000 tournament on Saturday:
John ‘Sexi Mexi’ Castaneda (14-2) of Mankato, Minnesota
Marcelo ‘Pitbull’ Rojo (12-4) of Cordoba, Argentina
Carlos ‘Lobo’ Rivera (10-2) of Mexico City, Mexico
Mikey ‘El Terrible’ Erosa (12-5) of San Juan, Puerto Rico
Marc ‘Lufo’ Gomez (20-10) of Barcelona, Spain
Andres ‘Doble A’ Ayala (11-4) of Bogota, Colombia
Kevin ‘El Frio’ Moreyra (4-1) of Lima, Peru
Ricky ‘El Gallero’ Palacios (9-1) of Mission, Texas
