A dire future
The future of lightweight in particular is looking particularly dire, with a charisma wasteland on the horizon once legends like Max Holloway and Charles Olivera retire in a few years.
It’s not that the future contenders aren’t looking promising, but that they aren’t being given the chance to shine like they once did. And it all feels very deliberate on the UFC’s end.
Right now, they’re more concerned with pushing the UFC brand as a whole than any one star. And ironically, this direction came with lessons learnt from promoting the biggest name in the sport: Conor McGregor.
McGregor: A perfect storm
When McGregor arrived in a perfect storm of trash talk, flashy KO’s and a magnetic personality, everything changed.
The huge numbers he brought to the sport made him the biggest name in MMA by a country mile, with no particularly close second place.
But MMA is not a rich man’s sport, despite the bravado and image some fighters like to portray. The pay scale is tipped massively in the company’s favour, with fighters earning a tiny percentage of the revenue compared to other sports leagues.
Bigger than the brand
With this in mind, Conor may be one of the most underpaid athletes in sports history, whilst also still managing to amass generational wealth for himself and his family.
In his prime, Conor became bigger than the sport, bigger than the UFC even. With that comes the relinquishing of some control.
And the UFC needs complete control.
Controlling fighters
The promotion likes its fighters hungry both literally and figuratively. If you can’t control a fighter through money, then how else are you supposed to control them?
Sitting on top of his millions (generated outside of MMA), Conor has been comfortably inactive for years now, and that’s not a mistake the UFC is keen to replicate.
Useful, not essential
In the current climate, stars are a useful commodity but not essential to the sport’s growth, as they were before. If the UFC has its way, no fighter will ever hold the same power Conor did again.
Before Paddy, the most recent example of the UFC grooming a fighter for future stardom was Sean O’Malley.
Unfortunately, it seems they mistook having multicoloured hair and face tattoos for a personality, with Sean being relatively reserved and awkward on the mic, despite looking like a GTA Online character.
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