We are also going to be covering WEC 30 this week, and I have a contributor coming on board to help do some exclusive interviews as well, anything to really help gauge the MMA world and help the fans get all the information they crave.

Thanks for the mention.

Zach does sit here bagging UFC every week. You haven’t been paying attention. He is an equal-opportunity bagger.

Furthermore, the difference between the early years of Zuffa LLC and the IFL in terms of losing money is quite the contrast. Zuffa LLC reportedly lost $40-45 million USD in five years. In one year, the IFL has lost $23.5 million USD — which is half of what Zuffa LLC lost in five years.

^^^^^

I agree with the other guy. Zach would’ve been sitting here bagging on the UFC every week about how much money they are losing.

Zach wouldn’t have had the IFL to compare it to…so the UFC losing 9 million a year would’ve been a big deal.

Can you imagine if Fight Opinion existed anytime between about 1997 and 2004 or so? We would have gotten weekly updates about how UFC will never make it and should just throw in the towel, due to their crushing debt.

To even compare the UFC to the IFL in terms of the course of business these groups took is laughable. Under Zuffa LLC ownership, they have used their own cash to fund their own operations. Did they lose significant money in the first few years? Yes they did. Did they go to the public and try to get money mark investors to pump money into their then-fledgling operation through a stock gimmick? They sure didn’t.

I’m glad the IFL and Pro Elite are publicly-traded companies (well, IFL is anyhow). Promoters like to have the PR benefit of saying they are publicly-traded and are clean, but the flipside is that you see the books — and most of the time in MMA or pro-wrestling, that’s a really bad idea to have.

Furthermore, the difference between the early years of Zuffa LLC and the IFL in terms of losing money is quite the contrast. Zuffa LLC reportedly lost $40-45 million USD in five years. In one year, the IFL has lost $23.5 million USD — which is half of what Zuffa LLC lost in five years.

However, the focus on negative retained earnings is kind of misplaced. Companies don’t go out of business from that. Retained earnings is just a balancing item basically…it normally represents accumulated profits and losses that haven’t been paid as dividends to shareholders, but in this company’s case, it’s almost meaningless because they keep converting those past expenses that lead to the loss into capital infusions that offset the losses (they never actually PAY for the accrued expenses with cash, they use stock shares and warrants that represent ownership stakes instead. My position is that these shares and warrants are worthless, so it’s a case of bigger fools here).

What WILL put you out of business is a lack of cash, and they have had a significant decrease in cash on hand in the last six months. What exactly the cash was actually spent on isn’t particularly clear (they’re only presenting an indirect cash flows statement that reconciles net profit or loss from the income statement to the beginning and ending cash balances on the balance sheet, the way we do this here is basically to just take the starting and ending balance sheets and then group the differences between them, with a few adjustments) because their income statement is basically BS since they’re “paying” for their expenses with worthless stock and options (common stock is the last thing you want to hold when a company is going down, because they come last in terms of receiving assets when a company is liquidated during bankruptcy … now if you actually believe that the company is going to turn around and become a profitable going concern, then it’s a different story).

I don’t regard this as a company that you can put any sort of faith into. Their cash position isn’t as bad as it looks because they’re entering into what I consider dodgy equity arrangements to pay for their events (this is beyond running up a credit card or issuing junk bonds, this is a situation where literally, they’re giving away something of NO VALUE WHATSOEVER in exchange for forgiveness of debts, and that is unbelievable to me), but schemes like this only last as long as there is a bigger fool down the line.