Everything I learned about MMA by working for a failed fight promotion

This is going to sound quaint to residents of the modern internet, but back around 2006 there was really only one website where you could buy a used car, find an apartment, meet strangers for random sexual encounters and look for a job all in one place. That website was Craigslist, and it’s where I found my first job in the world of MMA.

I was unemployed, living in New York City. I saw a job posting for “editorial director” from a company called the International Fight League. At the time, I knew two things about the IFL. The first was that they were pushing a team-based format where each event featured one squad of fighters coached by an MMA luminary taking on another squad, one fight at a time. The second was that they’d been sued by the UFC over the hiring of an executive who the UFC accused of sharing trade secrets.

The job was basically to write website content about the IFL’s fighters and upcoming events. As a hardcore MMA fan and jiu-jitsu nerd who had already written online articles on the sport for free, I was perfect for it. I also really, really needed a job. Naturally I applied, thinking I’d never get it, because isn’t that always the way? The job would go to someone’s nephew and I would slowly starve in Queens.

But then, one of those minor miracles in life — I did get the job. I found out later that it was because the dude who was their first choice attempted an ill-advised joke right at the end of his last interview. (Job interview tip: You’re probably never going to get hired with one joke, but you can definitely screw it up with one joke.) So they went to the next name on the list, which was me.

For about the next two years I criss-crossed the country with the IFL, doing my best to put a positive shine on the fighters while the company itself collapsed slowly at first and then all at once.

The experience was often stressful, but it was also highly educational. I learned a lot about this sport and realities of the fight promotion business during that time. Much of that falls into the category of "here’s what not to do when trying to compete with the UFC." Some of it, though, turned out to be lessons that still apply across the fight game, then and now and forever.

You can’t go from nothing to a UFC competitor all at once

When the IFL started, there were two big MMA promotions (UFC in North America, PRIDE FC in Japan) and a lot of little ones (Strikeforce, King of the Cage, WEC, etc.). The IFL founders and investors had no interest in starting as one of the little ones and trying to grow into one of the big ones. That’s partly because, aside from co-founder Kurt Otto, the people behind the IFL weren’t actually MMA fans. They didn’t want to get into the sport because they loved and understood it; they wanted to do it because MMA seemed like a hot new growth industry and they wanted to get in on the ground floor.

What they didn’t realize was they were already too late for that. The ground floor days had passed. UFC hadn’t quite cornered the market yet, but its name had become synonymous with the sport. And between the UFC and PRIDE, almost all the big-name fighters were already under contract.

The IFL started by inking deals with well-known but mostly retired figures in the sport who would act as coaches. Guys like Renzo Gracie, Pat Miletich, Bas Rutten, Carlos Newton, and Don Frye — they were all known to MMA fans for their exploits in the early days, but that didn’t mean people were eager to buy tickets just to see fighters they’d nominally “coached.” (Miletich really coached his guys. Newton mostly didn’t. Rutten was busy doing on-air commentary. Gracie was more of a spiritual leader than an on-the-mats-every-day kind of guy. Frye motivated through yelling and extremely creative swearing.)

The company tried all different kinds of ways to get the famous coaches more involved, including an awful rap song and video that, just for the record, I argued against. But buying up stars of MMA past didn’t translate to fan interest in the present. It was a big swing right out of the gate that didn’t pay off.

By contrast, Strikeforce started out as a regional promoter, mastering one market in the Bay Area of California. It spent money on known figures there, like Frank Shamrock and Cesar Gracie, but mostly promoted fights between up-and-coming local guys who could draw fans in that one region. Then, gradually, it grew from there.

To the extent any MMA promoter can compete with the colossal brand power of the UFC, this is still probably the way. Trying to start at or near the top requires such a huge initial investment that it gives you a short runway before you need to show some returns on investment. Which leads us to the next lesson.

Starting with a lot of money is a great way to lose a lot of money

Back in 2006, people loved a startup. The damn things were everywhere. Every time you turned around, someone was funneling a ton of other people’s money into companies that didn’t exist last month, often with amorphously optimistic plans for how they’d not only make it back but also triple and quadruple it.

Problem is, when you start with a lot of money, you tend to blow through it pretty quickly because it feels like you’ll never run out. Executive salaries are high. The advertising budget is wild. Next thing you know, you’re paying people whose role isn’t even clear.

At one point the IFL was paying six figures to some entertainment industry marketing dude whose primary contribution to the company was securing a completely unnecessary and unwelcome musical act to serve as the intermission for one of the events. Not only is live music typically a bad idea for fight shows, this one was a Britney Spears knockoff who was completely wrong for the audience demographic. Later, my favorite coworker used publicly available records to find out what all this had cost the IFL and used it in his own contract renegotiation, pointing out that if they had that kind of cash to spend on terrible ideas, they should definitely be paying him more to do things that were of actual value to the company. It worked. They gave him the raise he wanted.

Fighting is and always will be a mostly niche, star-driven business

The IFL started with the hope that its team format and cartoonish logos would help it appeal to a broader sports audience. The version of the MMA rules that it used also banned elbow strikes in an effort to minimize blood and court mainstream TV partners and sponsors, and fights took place in a more visually palatable boxing ring rather than a cage, with all its bloodsport connotations.

But fighting is always going to be fighting. It’s violent and raw and extreme. For the people who like it, this is part of the appeal. A lot of people will never come around to it for those reasons. They can maybe deal with the violence and sporting physicality inherent in football or hockey, but seeing one man repeatedly punch another in his bloodied and clearly already broken nose is just too much. Tying the competition to a specific city or coach or team name (the Tokyo Dragons were mostly Americans who lived and trained in Los Angeles, so that didn’t help) didn’t make man’s inhumanity to man any more appealing to those people.

Even among the people who do like fighting as a sport, most of them want to see specific fighters. They won’t buy tickets to see just any two people beat each other up. The IFL worked hard to create stars, and succeeded somewhat with guys like Ben Rothwell, Chris Horodecki, Roy Nelson and Tim Kennedy.

But individuals are what really drive this sport. Audiences need an emotional connection of some kind. Even the UFC is still somewhat at the mercy of this, and that’s after years of trying and largely succeeding to turn the brand into the star while striving to make the athletes more and more interchangeable.

Billing yourself as the fighter-friendly promotion is always a prelude to a fall

Professional fighting is, by its nature, inherently exploitative. Historically, fighters have had more in common with sex workers than they do with NFL players. So it only makes sense that every so often a fight promoter will come along and insist that they're going to do things differently and treat fighters better. This was a big part of the IFL’s creation myth and sales pitch to fans.

But the sad reality is that most fans aren’t particularly moved by this. They value entertainment over fighter welfare. It’s also inevitable that any promoter who sets this as a goal will fall short of it, and usually pretty quickly. When faced with a choice between what’s best for the bottom line and what’s best for the fighters, promoters will choose the bottom line.

We’ve seen this again and again in MMA. There isn’t a fight promotion in existence that doesn’t have some fighters angry at it for how they were treated and discarded once they no longer served the business interests of the owners. Trying to set yourself apart as the company that will change all that just guarantees that you’ll face more criticism for it when you fail.

It’s not all bad news, though…

These might be the hard-earned lessons of a failed fight promotion, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some highs to go with the lows.

The IFL really did have some good fighters, several of whom went on to have notable careers. It also put on some really, really good fights. It’s just that, with a TV deal that started out on tape delay before moving to live broadcasts on a forgotten network (MyNetworkTV, which still sounds made up when I try to tell people about it today), almost no one saw those fights when they happened.

If you’d like to change that, the good news is that a lot of them are still on YouTube.

Just, uh, maybe skip the IFL rap video.

[Ed. note: Please don't. Please watch it.]