Sadly, Affliction is Probably Gone for Good

With Tom Atencio letting everyone know that Affliction’s “Trilogy” show has officially been cancelled, it’s pretty safe to say that Affliction is done for good.  While this may seem presumptuous to those that hope for the best for the deep-pocketed promotion, my assessment does not come from a place of smugness or from being pleased about this turn of events.  I would have liked to see Affliction succeed in the long run, but I never really saw it happening, and this latest setback has only set in stone what appeared likely all along.

Simply put, you can’t hope to step right in and compete with the UFC.  Zuffa itself lost millions upon millions of dollars before finally getting out of the red after landing a nice television deal with Spike TV that finally gave the UFC (and the sport) the exposure that it deserved.  What other group could enter the sport and have that kind of patience, especially when the UFC’s success leads so many to believe that they should be successful pretty much right away?

Atencio can say all he wants that he was never trying to compete with the UFC, but that’s simply not realistic.  He had signed former UFC champions and the best heavyweight in the world, all while taking his shows to pay-per-view exclusively, which is the UFC’s domain when it comes to mixed martial arts.  How is that not going to be considered as direct competition? 

Sure, there are many fans out there who would gladly order an event like “Affliction: Trilogy” one weekend and UFC 101 the next, but those fans are the minority.  Eventually, Affliction would have had to take some of the UFC’s considerable market share to expand its own business.  Everything that Affliction did, from the fighters they signed to the exorbitant salaries that the company paid its fighters, said that they wanted to be a major league level MMA promotion.

The problem is that unless you can sign the likes of a Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture, or Tito Ortiz…that is, the real crossover stars that are hard to find in this business, you just aren’t going to be able to compete long enough to start being able to afford those high-priced salaries.  With all due respect to Andrei Arlovski, Tim Sylvia or even the great Fedor Emelianenko, none of those names are going to resonate with the mainstream MMA fans.  Worst of all, you are going against the UFC brand, which has been built up to be as big, if not bigger, than the fighters themselves.

How else can you explain that the UFC can main event a pay per view with the likes of Patrick Cote (again, no disrespect, but he’s not exactly a household name) and do numbers that Affliction couldn’t possibly dream of, even with the world’s top heavyweight?

Better yet, how did Affliction expect to be able to survive in such a competitive environment?

It would be nice if Affliction worked out.  The fighters need to have other promotions where they can go if the UFC decides that they are no longer needed in the octagon.  Also, competition forces the UFC to be at the top of their game, and keeps fighter salaries on the rise, as they should be.  However, realistically speaking, the signs were there all along.

The huge salaries that quite frankly, seemed unnecessary (why did they need to pay Tim Sylvia four times what the UFC used to pay him…especially when Dana White didn’t really seem interested in retaining him, anyway?) coupled with the low buyrates did not exactly spell out a good situation from the word “go”.  Also, Affliction (or any other competitor, for that matter) is not going to have the roster depth to be able to run a large amount of shows, or as we just saw, to be able to replace a top competitor if he is unable to compete at the last moment.  You wouldn’t see the UFC cancelling an event, even if there were injuries to every bout on the main card.

I’m convinced that the only way to build an MMA promotion that has a chance of sticking around and eventually prospering is through having a television deal from the get-go.  You simply can’t expect to build your promotion the way that Affliction has tried to.  The thing is, you can’t do it by starting small and building up a deep roster of young, talented fighters, either.  White would merely pick up the ones that he wanted as they developed, as he would be able to offer a salary and exposure that a fledgling promotion would not be able to compete with.  That’s why it’s inevitable that fighters like Bobby Lashley will end up in the UFC.  If it was as easy as snagging a young fighter like Lashley and building your promotion around him, someone would have done it already.

Instead, you have to spend your money wisely on fighters with both talent and marketability, and you absolutely have to have a television deal, so that fans can check out your product without an up-front investment.  Strikeforce has the right idea.  They have a viable partner in Showtime that can give their product exposure as it slowly builds recognition, they have high-level fighters, some of which even have some mainstream name recognition, and they can even offer a few things that the competition can’t (such as Gina Carano).  Even they will face an uphill battle.

“Trilogy” was a show that took enormous effort and planning to even put together, and even before Barnett’s failed test, Atencio was not sure when Affliction would be holding their fourth show.  If a promotion is so fragile that an injury or other setback to a main event fighter can cause the cancellation of an entire show, what chance do they have to stick around?  Furthermore, if a big bag of money and the best heavyweight in the world wasn’t enough to help a new promotion compete, what hope is there for anyone else out there with the dream of going toe to toe with the UFC?

Perhaps we’ve looked at this all along.  Perhaps the sport of mixed martial arts hasn’t gotten nearly as popular as we thought, and the UFC, in fact, will be the only promotion to reap the benefits of the so-called “mainstream acceptance” the sport was supposed to have achieved.  The UFC could do a few hundred thousand PPV buys by having Chuck Liddell kick my ass, for God’s sake.  Meanwhile, if you slap a different promotional name on the poster, there isn’t enough interest to watch the best heavyweight in MMA history compete?

Given that, what other conclusions can we come to?

by Jon Hartley for Fightmania.com

Tags: Andrei Arlovski, Chuck Liddell, Dana White, DREAM, Fedor Emelianenko, Patrick Cote, Randy Couture, Strikeforce, Tim Sylvia, Tito Ortiz, UFC