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The big story of the day is…
By Zach Arnold | June 24, 2008
… about UFC’s plans to run stadium shows in the UK. More information here and here.
Topics: MMA, Media, UFC, UK, Zach Arnold | 13 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback | Share This
Jeez, bad move. MMA in the pouring rain would not be a pleasant (or safe) experience for the fighters… and you can bet your ass that if they hold an outside event it will piss it down – we haven’t had any decent weather for two years over here.
Also, the last O2 event didn’t sell out at all. There were ~16,000 fans and sections of the arena weren’t even open.
It’s a nice little fluff piece for the organisation but it won’t happen any time soon (or at least it shouldn’t).
Believe it when I see it.
@MMA Game:
don’t some of the more modern stadiums here have retractable roofs? I’m thinking Cardiff, Wembly, and possibly the Emirates anyway. Either way, I agree that this is ridiculously premature.
The place to do a stadium show is Toronto or Montreal. The Montreal UFC show sold out in 2 minutes. 22,000 tickets. Sky Dome in Toronto would go crazy. Just a little matter of getting MMA sactioned in Ontario…. which seems like years off still. Thanks to the beurocrate Ken Hayashi.
Why the UK? Haven’t all of the UK shows been kind of hurting, attendance-wise? Like mentioned above, Canada or some big US city would work way better for this.
Of course, they would have to build up to it, put a ton of hype into it, make the card huge and place a ton of ads.
Canada or Hawaii are the only two places they should even think about doing stadium shows. And GSP (Canada) and Penn (Hawaii) would have to be on those cards.
One of the reason could be England is very densly populated..
There is 50 million people living there on a piece of land as small as Louisiana.
yeah… dana was talking about this two weeks ago……
http://www.mmapayout.com/2008/06/more-stadium-talk-from-dana.html
They’ve said all of these things before, it’s just that this time they managed to get another round of headlines in the U.K. out of it.
Only stadium that I know has a roof is the Millenium in Cardiff – don’t think Wembley or Arsenal do.
As for whether they could fill the Millenium… 80,000 fans? hahahhahahahahahahaha!
Definitely just an effort to get headlines but it won’t happen any time soon.
Emirates is roofed over the stands. Most of the stadiums over there are.
No reason that you can’t erect a temporary roof over the stage, god knows they’ll be putting up truckloads of lights and fog machines and they’re going to want to protect them if not the fighters.
If there was a roof over the octagon, the people in the top of the stands wouldn’t be able to see in, which in turn would mean you couldn’t have full capacity, which in turn would mean they might as well have it in an arena
the olympic stadium would be perfect for the ufc. mtl sold out for the ufc and the olympic stadium had the duran no mas fight. montreal is a fighting city and the olympic stadium would be the perfect venue.