« Thursday news and links | Home | Jungle FC signs deal with boxing promoter »
UFC Officially Announce UK Show
By Ally Clark | February 15, 2007
The UFC today officially announced it’s return to the UK on April 21st. It’ll be the first time since 2002 that the biggest MMA promotion in the US and arguably the world has produced an event in Great Britain.
In the press release posted on the UFC website President Dana White described his delight at his company finally returning. “We are very excited to be back in the UK, We had a lot of obstacles over the last six years, but I never gave up on bringing the UFC back to the UK. Now we have our UK office up and running, we’re going to have fights in the UK and throughout Europe, so the UFC is here to stay.â€
It is the first of a rumoured five shows to take place in the UK this year and goes head to head with leading British promotion Cage Rage on the same day in April.
More to follow.
Topics: Ally Clark, Media, MMA, Press Releases, UFC, UK | 9 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
If Mirko is there I would love to go but Sapp could be at Cage Rage. Call me crazy but I want to see Sapp v Butterbean live.
Liger05 you are crazy. I’m off to Manchester!
They’re both going to be entertaining nights out but UFC definitely has the quality. Am going to see what the UFC ticket pricing structure is – if it starts at £50 or something ridiculous like that I might have second thoughts.
BTW – who picked the 21st first as ‘their’ date. It would be completely counter productive for UFC to try and squash Cage Rage, but with their Pride affiliation (whatever that is worth these days)?
50 British Pounds is almost $100 USD. I’m sure at least some of the tickets will be more than that. Heck, they are $400 to $750 for the best tickets in the states.
However, if they want to attract the fans at first, they might try to have a good portion of the arena relatively cheap.
UFC UK, in my opinion, is going to become the central hub for the UFC in Europe. It will be much easier for them to recruit European Fighters with a show that is there 4 times a year (maybe more in the future).
Cage Rage put on the best fight of last year…Cyborg vs Manhoef.
I hope the UFC expanding in Europe doesnt kill Cage Rage. Would be unhealthy for the sport in the Europe.
Cage Rage unfortunatly seems to have picked up the Pride/K-1 stunt booking bug. They used to have a nice balance of good to great fighters and local boy/special attraction booking. Now they are going all out for heavyweight attractions whilst not doing enough to build the decent european talent thry have. People like Brad Pickett sell tickets, the stunt one off bookings will burn the market out. The market has got a lot harder with UFC and K-1 signing their best overseas talent but there are better ways of going about building a roster than the approach they are taking at the moment.
MMA critic – I was referring to the cheapest price tickets. When they ran the Royal Albert Hall during the lean times they started the ticket prices at £50. That was for a much smaller building (they will do 16-18 thousand depending on the the set up in Manchester) but I’d think twice about paying £50 quid for a ticket.
Having said that I’ve been thinking about taking a £1000 trip to Las Vegas for a UFC card so swings and rounderbouts!
Cro Cop rules, so obviously, this will be a success, but wouldn’t it be even cooler if the ICEMAN was fighting?