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Sumo’s financial mess grows big
By Zach Arnold | February 8, 2011
Previous articles:
- February 1, 2011 – The mess in the Japanese fight game grows: More Sumo match-fixing claims by police
- February 3, 2011 – Fuji TV pulls the plug on airing upcoming Sumo tournament
- February 5, 2011 — Meltdown: March Sumo tournament reportedly canceled
With the latest Sumo scandal being labeled ‘the greatest stain on the history of Sumo’, there are plenty of people asking if Sumo is still fit to be Japan’s national sport.
Hakuho is now having TV commercials temporarily taken off the air and other top Sumo fighters are scrambling financially with the upcoming March tournament in Osaka now canceled. The companies that manage Osaka Prefectural Gym, where the March tournament was going to be held, are now asking for cancellation fees to be paid because the annual tournament accounts for 25% of the building’s yearly revenue. Money marks Financial supporters who pony up money for tournaments are reportedly looking for their money back. Another local event promoter claims that he’s in the red 15-20 million yen and wants to be taken care of. To top it all off, Hakuho’s stable kept the media away from their practice session today.
Oh, and an update about the Sumo Association’s investigation into incriminating evidence regarding match-fixing claims? Some of the evidence apparently has been destroyed. The London Telegraph brings the metaphorical whammy and discusses the rise of an appropriate sporting contest during Sumo’s big crisis — competitive hole digging.
- Businessweek: ‘Goldman Sachs with guns’ joins Sumo on ropes
Topics: Japan, Media, Zach Arnold | 15 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Santiago was released by Sengoku. Releasing a champion? The organization is finished.
I bet he ends up in Strikeforce. He has more value to them as they have no real challenger to Souza and are likely to be willing to over pay just to get another “challenger” for their belt. But as these organizations continue to crumble, try won’t be able to just bring in Japanese Champions as challengers and will be forced to create their own.
Either way, things are consolidating in MMA this year. Would love to see some if the Feather and Bantam guys come over to the UFC just to add some depth…..
When will DRESM eventually let their roster go? My guess is by June….
Destroying evidence?
“There’s not a problem here…nothing to see…move along.”
Destroying evidence is as low or as desperate as you can go, and it almost never works. There is always a paper trail somewhere to someone.
2 Million viewers for UFC 126 Prelims. Some people are making it into a bigger deal thenthey should. There has been a lot of snow in parts of the country so it’s not shocking rating were up. The former record was 1.7 Million for Couture/Coleman…. Which also happened during a major snowstorm.
Jorge Santiago was released from Sengoku. That organization is officially done with.
I expect Santiago to go to SF. They have more incentive to overpay him as they need fights for their champion. With all of these organizations go out of business, SF will have fewer of these opportunities available and they will be forced to use their own built talent to fight for the titles. This is something they haven’t been good at so far, so it could be a rocky road for them soon.
I think that’s a bit of an unfair statement. Firstly, they’ve obviously filled the vaccuum left by Affliction and EXC as the #2 promotion so they were largely going to populate their upper-end ranks with guys that were already “stars” or known commodities, to think they would utilize any other strategy is foolish (not saying you’re claiming they should do different, but there’s no other route they could have taken).
Second, in terms of “building” talent, while they did not originate each talent, they have ‘built’ up guys like KJ Noons, Nick Diaz, Jacare, Le, Gil Melendez, Moussasi, King Mo and Jake Shields in terms of national level recognition and legitimate title challengers/holders. And they are smartly cultivating guys like Rockhold, Woodley, Cormier, Johnson, St. Preux and Del Rossario. Of course the amount of recognition/draw for each is on a relative scale for the promotion. You can’t really fault them because they did such a good job on Shields that he was able to get an insane deal from the UFC that made zero sense for them to match or that they allowed Carano to elevate her public status to the point that she could leave for Hollywood.
All in all, I think it’s misleading to say they haven’t been good at building talent…I think they’ve made some obvious missteps (Lashley’s push and his ‘rub’ going to Chad Griggs rather than Cormier/Del R) but that’s to be expected from a company that’s been growing on a national for 4 years.
You could hear a pin drop in New York during Shields UFC debut…. Hardly built up anything. They tried to destroy his career for wanting to leave and accidentally created a UFC title challenger in the process. Hardly something to be proud of.
Just look at the lack of challengers to most of their belts as proof of how little they know about building up fighters.
They built a guy up enough that he was the prefunctory challenger for GSP’s belt and will be fighting on arguably one of their biggest shows to date – not to mention one that the UFC spent tons of cash prying him away. He was on CBS a number of times, including them providing him an opportunity to be on one of their most hyped shows ever and giving him a main event slot on CBS.
“They tried to destroy his career for wanting to leave and accidentally created a UFC title challenger in the process. Hardly something to be proud of.”
That’s a fucking laughably ridiculous comment.
First, he fucked them over six ways from Sunday when they’d done nothing but build him up and give him exposure and opportunities and he repaid them by totally screwing them over, appearing on a ‘competitor’s’ televised/ppv fight card and all but confirm he was walking away with or without their belt. Yet they put him in a headliner fight against their newly acquired name fighter, which made absolute sense in every way shape and form.
Second, speaking of ‘destroying his career for wanting to leave’, aren’t you the guy that gets out the pom poms and vuvuzela to toot the Zuffa company line every time they’ve done this…if you want to talk about a company with a callous history of trying to ‘destroy a fighters career for wanting to leave’ we could write an article the size of the Iliad on that one. If SF was truly following the UFC’s example they would have sat him for 16 months and then had him fight on the undercard.
A buddy sent me a link to the following items: http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2011/2/8/1982684/a-bloody-elbow-goodbye-sort-of
Looks like some consolidation going on at SBNation (“parent” blog to a number of sports/mma/boxing blogs)that Luke Thomas is leaving Bloody Elbow to run SBNation’s MMA blog full-time.
I don’t know a great deal about how they SBN operates but seems like the main MMA blog operatives in a derivative sense like BE, i.e. as an aggregator of stories from all of SBN’s (and other mma) blogs which the editors then provide additional insight/commentary on. Seems odd they wouldn’t just continue to build on the “brand equity” of BE, but I guess there’d be some sword crossing on who owns what, etc. Interesting to see how that all works out in the future.
Zach as an mma writer/blogger you have a take?
Not sure. I won’t criticize. I think it’s interesting the ‘decentralization’ yet centralization strategy they seem to be taking. They’re taking some big gambles (i.e. the hire of former ESPN writer Rob Neyer) and seem to be in the sink-or-swim mode.
What do you mean in sink or swim mode Zach? Can you elaborate or expand on what you mean in context to Bloody Elbow and their parent company?
I think he means that they’re making a commitment in salary to writers. So they’re going to need to establish solid revenues to maintain that or go broke.
The gamble is you pay more to bring in better writers to bring in more eyeballs to sell more ads for a higher dollar amount. The only thing that is certain in that is you will be paying more in salary. So if they eyeballs and advertisers don’t follow and/or you can’t sell the company to a larger entity, you go broke.
reminds me of Zach’s old post from way back on Jordan Breen’s advice
Advice to people who want to become MMA writers
“2. Also, don’t expect to be paid a lot. It’s not a business that you’re going to become rich in. Very few people do. So if that’s your goal, yeah, you may fall short on that one.”
http://www.fightopinion.com/2010/05/10/advice-mma-writers/
Yeah nothing against it…just seemed to me that if you were going to pump money into something why not leverage off the already established BE platform. Seems to me if one was going to make money of something it would have been trying to monetize BE.
But as I said before, I guess it’s not an SBN property to make those investments and reap the potential rewards…and BE probably isn’t in a position to pay guys, so next best thing is SBN takes the rub and credibility of pulling over Luke Thomas and others and hope it pays off. Apparently they’re credentialed for UFC…
That Business Week article was an elightening read.
Off topic: Luke Thomas at bloodyelbow moved on, Gross did it too. http://www.mmaforreal.com/ got shut down too about 3 days ago.
WOW. The great writers are getting hit. Thank god for this site as there aren’t too many great writers out there now.
I think there’s more going on than is being let on at the moment. A little too convenient that a number of SBN mma blogs (mmaforreal, WKR, etc.) are being shuttered while their main MMA page is expanding with paid writers…