Sunday 28 August 2011

UFC Rio likely seen in 30,000,000 homes in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO – It took 13 years for the UFC's return to the spiritual home of MMA following the promotion's 1998 debut in Brazil, but after Saturday's well-received UFC 134 event, don't count on that type of delay happening again.

In fact, White confirmed the promotion is likely to return to Brazil in 2012 with a stadium show, and a Brazilian office is also in the works.

Following the UFC's sold-out event at Rio de Janeiro's HSBC Arena, White said the country's passion for the sport inside the arena – not to mention the apparent 30 million or so homes that watched on TV – ensured Brazil will be another featured target for the promotion moving forward.

"I've been doing events all over the world for the last 10 years," White said. "Brazil wins for the loudest crowd ever. The cool thing about this show, too, was the place was packed from the first fight of the night. The first fight of the night sounded like the title fight.

"We might be here every weekend."


While White was kidding about the frequency, he certainly wasn't overstating the success of the event. The city of Rio de Janeiro was abuzz all week, and while tickets were impossible to come by, White said those who couldn't be in the arena were glued to their televisions.

"We're getting early polling back from TV in Brazil that we did a 20 percent share tonight, which could be almost 30 million homes," White told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) following the evening's post-event press conference. "Huge."

Unlike most U.S. shows, White was not aware of exactly how many seats were sold and how much revenue was generated at the gate. Instead, he only noted that the HSBC Arena was "sold-out."

While the 14,000 fans or so on hand did more than enough to provide an electric atmosphere for the event, White admits his team could have booked a much larger venue and been highly successful. However, White said he also wanted to iron out the kinks on a small scale before returning to the country in full force.

"This was a successful event before it even happened," White said. "The reality is that we came in, and a lot of people were looking for tickets for this event.

"We could have sold more tickets. We could have done some big, huge, major events out in the streets, including the weigh-ins and everything else. We wanted this one to go smooth, get it behind us and move on to the next one."

While the UFC cited strong demand for tickets as a reason many fans' demands for entry were denied, Brazilians all week quietly grumbled that many seats were never even available for public purchase.

White said he wasn't entirely sure to what to attribute the challenges but said the promotion will remedy that issue by returning for a stadium show sometime in 2012, likely in Manaus, as Lorenzo Fertitta first stated earlier this week.

"How the ticket situation works down here is completely different than anywhere else," White said. "It's something that's going to have to be worked out in the future.

"Trust me, people aren't going to have triuble getting tickets to the next one. I guarantee you that. We're jumping big next time. We're going big. We're not playing around next time."

Does that mean 100,000-seat stadium, as was first reported? When? Where?

White wasn't ready to share specifics, instead insisting everything was in the initial planning stages. However, the enthusiastic response for the UFC in Brazil means the country is likely to become the fourth country, along with Canada, China and Great Britain, to score a remote office of thew world's largest MMA promotion.

"We're probably real close to setting up an office down here," White said. "This is a huge market for us, and we're just getting started.

"I don't want to get ahead of myself here, but when you do business in other countries, there's a lot of things you've got figure out. But it absolutely, positively makes sense for us to have an office down here."

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