They went for a lower offer from a company that felt the best thing to do with the UFC was to slash the fuck out of its budget. I can't tell if that's irony or not.
I'm just going to cut & paste a list of WME accomplishments I wrote in the comment thread in the Bloody Elbow article (which somehow managed to be the very first comment), with a bit of editing:
WME's UFC Accomplishments
WME-IMG spent $4 billion on the company only to immediately go into budget-slashing mode once they bought it, treating it like some money-losing fixer-upper instead of a rising juggernaut, with correspondingly awful results.
They've also made completely arbitrary decisions to do things like add a Women’s 145 division on the baseless assumption that all the pieces would line up, then instead of trying to salvage it as a developmental project, they’re pretending it doesn’t even exist.
They gave an unknown Cynthia Calvillo two PPV main card fights in six weeks because Ari Emanuel happened to catch her debut (wherein she crushed a can) and liked what he saw, when the far more proven and marketable Tecia Torres has been begging for over six months, and former world #1 Jessica Aguilar has only finally gotten a fight after a year and a half.
They’ve started to hemorrhage top 10 talent to the point where Bellator has outright admitted that they’re 2.5 years ahead of schedule on poaching fighters. And now Rizin and Absolute Championship Berkut are also getting in on the flood of free agents to become rising regional powers.
They’ve also logged-jammed some of the divisions so hard that there are ranked fighters who would rather take day jobs than fight for the UFC. They've let good fighters walk away without even offering them a new contract, and let others go by only offering an insulting one.
They let the #4 Flyweight in the world walk, a young guy who was also their strongest Japanese draw, because they wouldn’t give him a raise. They let LHW wither away to the point where a top MW contender like Yoel Romero would be even money against a LHW title challenger like Jimi Manuwa.
They’ve made arbitrary personnel decisions like firing Goldie without any sort of replacement ready, and they drove Joe Silva away from the sport entirely. I'm sure he claims he retired because of the workload, but if they wanted a better product they should have done everything in their power to at least keep him on as a consultant or to book just two or three divisions.
They've reversed the UFC's long-standing efforts on international expansion and are now running fewer events in international markets across the board, including the extremely important Brazilian market, where they've dropped to just three shows a year, and when they run Singapore in June it'll be the UFC's first Asian show in 18 months. And that Russian market that was supposed to be the next big thing? Still nothing.
They've used Interim Titles so often that it's become a running joke, and when an Interim LW Title fight fell through mere hours before weigh-ins, the decided to pay the guy who didn't scratch less than half of his show money. Because nothing inspires loyalty like screwing someone out of over $100,000 because his opponent scratched at 5 AM instead of 9 AM, when the UFC would have been legally obligated to give him his show purse.
And now fighters put UFC management on blast so often that it's become a routine part of the news cycle.
They’ve done nothing to mitigate the continuing Reebok damage, or help fighters with sponsorships below the Rousey/McGregor tier, and I’m also not seeing lots of new roles for UFC fighters in Hollywood films or on television, the one area where you’d think WME could absolutely make a difference.
The UFC has gotten clearly worse under WME.
But hey, Ronda Rousey got a Pantene commercial.
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