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Is Andrew McManus the money man behind ImpactFC in Australia?
By Zach Arnold | May 27, 2010
To give you background on ImpactFC and what is going on there (this is the promotion that has booked Ken Shamrock and Josh Barnett), I urge you to read Robert Joyner’s two articles on this topic.
If you don’t read the articles, the rest of this post won’t make enough contextual sense.
For those who don’t know the history of Andrew McManus in his extracurricular activities outside the music industry, his name is most recognizable for his failed attempts at running big pro-wrestling shows in Australia under the World Wrestling All-Stars banner.
The idea behind WWA was that the promotion would try to fill the void when WCW went out of business and essentially book “name” only workers and try to draw via a tour-style set-up. As Robert pointed out in his articles, that’s exactly what ImpactFC is planning on doing. I still can’t believe that those fight cards by ImpactFC featuring guys fighting twice in two or three weeks is going to pan out.
If Robert’s reporting pans out (and I have no reason to believe it doesn’t) that Mr. McManus is behind ImpactFC, then expect the promotion to try to make a big splash in Australia and perhaps end up trying to get into a turf war there with UFC or at least play #2 to the organization.
A lot of money could be thrown around very shortly and it will be interesting to see which fighters will take the cheese. It could be a headache for other non-UFC MMA promotions.
Topics: Media, MMA, Zach Arnold | 2 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
This will just mean Japan gets even less world class talent to choose from. With Abu Dhabi Championship Fighting probably going to pay big bucks as well, I could see Strikeforce, Dream, IFC, MFC (Canada), M1, Ultimate Chalenge(UK) ADFC etc all sharing talent
Robert’s articles are interesting, but he’s vastly overestimated the UK market here.
“Pick up a couple of name UK guys like Al-Turk, James Thompson, Tom Kong Watson…add in a few of the guys they are using on these Aussie shows and you have a Cage Rage-ish type show that might have some appeal for UK audiences.”
Cage Rage tried the whole ‘UK stars mixed with international talent’ formula years ago (Tank Abbott, Ninja Rua, Phil Baroni, Vitor Belfort, etc) and all it did was essentially run them into the ground.
There were always a couple of thousand empty seats when they ran Wembley Arena and the one show they did outside of London was more than half empty.
The 3rd BAMMA show with the Watson-Reid fight that never happened (Tom still fought) didn’t come anywhere close to selling out a small-ish arena, despite the fact that Alex’s withdrawal was denied up until the week of the fight.
MMA is still ‘UFC’ in the UK, as least as far as the casual fans who pack the O2/MEN Arena are concerned. Nobody knows who Josh Barnett, Jeff Monson or Paulo Filho are. Impact FC won’t work in the UK, period.