Could violent soccer fans in Brazil harm UFC event?
The British say Soccer is played by gentlemen, but watched by hooligans. The phenomenon of violent soccer fans is not…
The British say Soccer is played by gentlemen, but watched by hooligans. The phenomenon of violent soccer fans is not a problem solely in Britain, but plays out across Europe, and in Brazil as well.
With Brazil Soccer clubs now sponsoring UFC fighters at UFC 142 in Rio, the possibility of soccer violence spilling over into MMA has been raised.
“It’s very delicate for us to talk about a sport in which there have been several deaths in the crowds,” Belfort commented at Thursday’s UFC 142 pre-event press conference. “This is serious.”
“Having lived in the U.K., I understand how tribal the sport is,” said UFC exec Marshall Zelaznik told MMAjunkie.com. “And there are so many religious overtones to these sports.”
“I’ve been learning a little bit about the history of Brazilian soccer since I’ve been here. There’s such a deep passion, and the obvious concern is that you’ll get Jose Aldo’s Flamengo fans coming to support him. You’ll get guys from Vasco to come in and support Mendes, and the next thing you know we’ve got a fight in the crowd. Next thing you know, people are writing that the UFC is a violent sport, and it has nothing to do with the actual sport. So we’d be foolish not to evaluate that.”
“The fighters are handling it great. We’ve discussed it with the teams. They understand the sensitivity. On the positive side of this, I think it shows how real the UFC is. Soccer is the national sport, and for the biggest teams in the nation to want to associate with the UFC and in a lot of cases pay money to the fighters – to sponsor them – shows the national sport and these teams realize the UFC is for real. It’s legitimate.
“You get the chills when you think about, ‘Wow, imagine if in the U.K., Manchester United walked in and said, ‘We want to be associated with someone.” People in the U.K. would say, ‘Man, this is incredible.’ But we also worry about those things in the U.K. – fighters wearing a team jersey for Manchester if we’re going to be in Liverpool or carrying a flag when we were in Ireland of the U.K. We always look at it.”
“We have the best fans in the world. Every arena we go to talks about how great they are. The new arenas anticipate, ‘Oh, boy. Here come the cagefighting guys. I wonder what that’s going to be like.’ And then the crowds are great. That’s all part of what the UFC is, and if that goes wrong, that’s just like a tire blowout on a car. It could be really damaging. We’ve got to watch it and monitor it and make sure we don’t see those sort of tribal behaviors.
“We’d be foolish not to evaluate it. It’s probably much ado about nothing, but we have to keep watching it.”