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Strikeforce/Fedor conference call set for Thursday
By Zach Arnold | August 4, 2009
2 PM EST/11 AM PST start, featuring Fedor, Coker, and Vadim.
BTW, one of the major ‘sticking points’ being floated today about why M-1 and Fedor signed with Strikeforce is that M-1 wanted the video rights to be able to distribute in Russia. The line being touted is that M-1 wants to make money on Fedor in Russia and make him a big star. Here’s the problem — PRIDE, under Nobuyuki Sakakibara & Sotaro Shinoda, gave M-1 the rights to PRIDE footage in Russia and… it hasn’t helped Fedor become a big star in Russia.
Article alert: In their own words – Dana White on why UFC failed to sign Fedor
Topics: M-1, Media, MMA, StrikeForce, Zach Arnold | 44 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Fedor has not been marketed very effectively at all.
The humble everyman approach with Fedor could turn him into a household name if the American public finds out what this guy is like beyond the ternminator hype.
Without being presumptious, anyone here could make an argument that if Dana White wanted to do this deal for the fans, he would have done a one fight deal with Fedor period. If he had so much faith in his “top” fighter this Fedor discussion would be over. But I do recollect Dana having a bet back in 2003 with Pride that Chuck Liddell would win the Middleweight GP and any true fan knows the result of that. Dana, you openly talk the talk if the fans want this make it happen. If we the fans are into brand loyalty the UFC will not suffer any financial setback and this fight will grow the UFC more worldwide than the past 5 years combined. Make it happen for the WAMMA belt only, that way if your guy loses, he still holds the UFC belt. Dana, you claim to have the gonads, if you want to silence Fedor, call him out have a one off with Strikeforce or buy Strikeforce and force the issue.
I don’t think the American public cares about the humble everyman approach. Tim Duncan is a great player, he’s very humble, but he doesn’t burn up the headlines. He’s mostly forgotten when he’s not leading the Spurs in the playoffs.
Fedor can’t draw in Japan. Fedor can’t draw in Russia. Fedor can’t draw in the US.
It’s safe to say Fedor is not a draw. Why anybody would want to build a MMA organization around him is beyond me. I know is the #1 ranked Heavyweight, but he has large financial demands without much upside.
And I can’t see him being marketable even on CBS.
Typical 45 huddle rubbish. If you go to his site you can see Fedors great at drawing. Heres one of you.
http://www.mmaroot.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/fedor-emelianenko-drawing-8.jpg
actually the whole image/broadcast rights thing started with Fedor (and Crocop’s) old manager Mijatovic
Originally Mijatovic negotiated Crocop’s image and broadcast rights from K1 and Pride for Croatia and then arranged live broadcasts of Crocop’s fights. This led to Crocop’s huge popularity in his homeland leading to his election into parliament
Mijatovic was trying a similar strategy with Fedor back in the Inoki Bom Ba Ye days and then with teh return to Pride. But Mijatovic and M1 had a falling out and M1 took over the strategy
unfortunately for Fedor, M1 hasnt been that successful with the strategy with Fedor still a nobody except on MMA message boards
The same message boards are barely talking about UFC 101, and yet that is the biggest thing of the week to most casual MMA fans. That and the signing of Tito Ortiz by the UFC. That will sell future PPV’s and tickets. That has more impact on the sport.
Steve… That is troll looks pathetically sad…. Even for being a troll….
I don’t think Strikeforce will go out of business while on Showtime. However, I do give it 12 months before they look like a shell of themselves from a Fedor loss and the UFC poaching their talent.
Except that now M-1 was able to schedule Fedor’s next fight on Channel One in Russia, biggest network. Trilogy fight against Barnett was going to show until event got cancelled.
yes Joseph, M1 always has such grand plans, and all those little words, like, “If”, “was going to” “until” come out
the sum effect – failure
In case you missed it in the article below, here is how you can potentially get in on the press conference:
* * * MEDIA TELECONFERENCE ALERT * * *
FEDOR “THE LAST EMPEROR’’ EMELIANENKO
SCOTT COKER & VADIM FINKELCHTEIN
To Hold Media Conference Call
Thursday, Aug. 6, at 2 P.M. ET/11 A.M. PT
WHO: MMA Superstar & World’s Universally Recognized No. 1 Heavyweight Fedor, STRIKEFORCE Founder & CEO Scott Coker, President of M-1 Global Vadim Finkelchtein
WHAT: Fedor and the executives will participate in a national media conference call to discuss the potentially game-changing announcement Monday that the fervently sought-after Emelianenko had signed a historic, multi-fight agreement that will see him headline mega-events co-promoted by STRIKEFORCE and M-1 Global.
Fedor will make his premium television debut during the fall when his first fight under the new agreement airs live on SHOWTIME®. Up until now, all his live fights had aired exclusively on pay-per-view in the United States.
ACCESS #: (888) 299-4099 (U.S. Toll Free), (866) 682-1172 (Canadian Toll Free), (302) 709-8337 (International Toll);
Ask For SHOWTIME/Strikeforce/M-1 Global Conference Call
(Verbal Passcode: VB37030)
WHEN: Thursday, Aug, 6, 2009; 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT
Fedor #1
how do they plan on marketing him, doesn’t the ufc own the footage from pride, and now the affliction rights?
i wonder who has the bodogs video rights, they can showcase fedor by showing him beating matt lanlind. that’ll get the casual viewer.
“…they can showcase fedor by showing him beating matt lanlind….”
Yeah, they can show his stellar takedown defense that he used against Lindland.
Who owns the RINGS footage? It would basically be useless as the footage probably is in bad shape and those fighters were kind of boring….
According to mmalogic… And even I’m a potential non-believer on this one…. But it’s so far out there…. I figured I would comment on it.
1. The UFC has Fedor’s next fight under contract. They have the rights to it in the US.
2. They are thinking about putting a fighter against him in a closed door fight. Obviously if the UFC fighter wins, the video will be distributed. If he loses, the video will be squashed in the states.
3. The reasoning for doing this is to avoid a drawn out war with Strikeforce that would cost the UFC millions be increasing pay and so forth. It would also get the last #1 fighter outside of the UFC out of the way. Which means every fighter to prove themselves has to go through the UFC….
Like I said… This is basically unbelievable… Go to Bloody Elbow and read it all for yourself…. It’s under the Scott Coker article about him saying there basically is no war.
It’s so bizarre…. Keep in mind that mmalogic broke the C&D letter to Strikeforce a few hours before it was announced by anybody else….
I think the online MMA fans are actually worse than the online wrestling fans were in the late 1990’s.
Fedor would fight in your basement if you wrote M-1 on the door
If no one cares about Fedor, why is everyone talking about him more than the two upcoming cards this weekend? Both have great fights.
I read the thread that 45 Huddle referred to. My conclusion is that either the person using “mmalogic” as an alias has lost his mind, or his bosses/friends at Zuffa have lost their minds. I’m guessing the former is much more likely than the latter.
If there’s one thing that’s clear about this “mmalogic” person, it’s that while he clearly does have some contacts at Zuffa, he’s also a bit of a fraud.
He claims to make $3,000 per hour, yet he spends long periods of his time posting in the comments section of an MMA blog. (Yes, I also spend long periods of time posting in the comments section of an MMA blog, but then again I’m not claiming to be making $3,000 per hour.)
He claims that his advice is worth $30,000 to $300,000 per hour, yet he just spent three hours on the comments section of a Bloody Elbow post, soliciting advice from the extremely scientific sample of “whoever happened to be on Bloody Elbow during that three-hour period,” and he acted as though their recommendations are going to have a big role in the advice that he does or doesn’t give to Zuffa. Yup, sounds to me like someone who makes $3,000 per hour and whose advice is worth $30,000 to $300,000 per hour…
Oh, and someone who makes $3,000 per hour and whose advice is worth $30,000 to $300,000 per hour would also probably not be stupid enough to publicly imply that Zuffa will destroy the footage if their fighter loses to Fedor…
Zack: when people say “no one cares about Fedor” what they usually are referring to are casual fans, most of whom do not care about Fedor at all. To them, the big deal is the upcoming UFC card. We’re a bunch of freaks here on the web, but we don’t make a large enough or unified enough contingent to actually wield power with our wallets.
The dude missed on the Fedor story completely and his view of Strikeforce was equally laughed out. Now people are giving creedence to this talk about a closed door fight? Play Rome’s doppleganger out, keyboard cat….
45 Huddle: “Fedor can’t draw in the US.
….It’s safe to say Fedor is not a draw. Why anybody would want to build a MMA organization around him is beyond me.”
If this is true, can you explain why Zuffa offered him the largest contract in MMA history?
Get every single #1 ranked fighter in the world.
Snowden:
there are two answers to your question. First Dana and Lorenzo are huge MMA fans. I know Dana pretty well and have for years. Nobody loves MMA more than him. He honestly has wanted Fedor for years. He also wanted Rampage, wanderlei, shogun, nog and crocop when they were in PRIDE. That’s why he even put up with Fedors guys long enough to make such a big offer.
Second, if Fedor signed a six fight deal and beat Brock in the first fight they could make Fedor the biggest name in American MMA. They can air all his fights on Spike and do crazy training specials in Russia. If Fedor lost to Brock you can tell him and the Rooskies to piss off and you only paid for one megafight.
Plus, think about what will happen now….
The UFC is going to compete with Strikeforce. This means they will have to increase fighter pay and make above market value offers to some of Strikeforce’s stars and champions. In the end, it costs them more money to bring Strikeforce back down.
If they signed Fedor, Strikeforce wouldn’t have a claim to anybody, and any fighter in any weight division would have to fight in the UFC to fight the #1 in the world.
At the end of the day, this is still a battle Zuffa will win. They have more money, more vested interest, and too much market share to lose it. However, it would have been optimal to just get Fedor already.
If Fedor loses, look for the guy who beat him to get a big money offer from the UFC…. I’m talking just as big as Fedor’s contract was. Almost like a “thank you” sort of thing….
“Plus, think about what will happen now….
The UFC is going to compete with Strikeforce.”
This was already happening well *BEFORE* Fedor signed with Strikeforce.
For the people who said boxing isn’t dead in the states….
http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/blog/cagewriter/post/Pay-per-view-distributor-says-boxing-is-dead?urn=mma,180927
While boxing’s promoter business model has done more harm then good over the long haul…. Boxing has a long history that gives us a very good idea of how this will play out….
1. Women’s Fighting – Boxing has shown this is not a long term viable option. If it was, a boxing promoter would have been able to make it happen with either Christy Martin or Laila Ali. Martin was on the undercard of Mike Tyson events. Ali is obvious the daughter of what the mass media claims is the best boxer of all time. To me, if Ali couldn’t make women’s boxing a profitable and viable option, I don’t see it happening in any combat sport. And it’s not like people don’t know who she is either….
2. Being #1 in the world doesn’t always mean that much. I would love a perfect system in MMA that was purely based on accomplishments. But that isn’t how fights are sold. Mike Tyson wasn’t the #1 Heavyweight for years, and he still had selling power. Lennox Lewis was never a huge draw without fighting a bigger star, despite being #1 in the world.
The same can be said for Oscar De La Hoya. He wasn’t #1 in any weight class for years and still pulled in record PPV numbers. Heck, he got beat pretty easily by Bernard Hopkins but still got record PPV numbers after that.
People want to see bigger then life stars fighting. That is what drives fight sports. Tito Ortiz’s record isn’t very good. Doesn’t have a win over a guy not named Ken Shamrock in over 3 years. And yet he will outsell and outgate Anderson Silva any day of the week.
How this applies to Strikeforce. They are banking on Women’s Fighting and the #1 Heavyweight in the world. This just doesn’t work. Fedor is never going to be a star in the United States. Women’s MMA will never having the money drawing power that men do. To bank your future on these two things isn’t the way I would think Scott Coker should have. It’s not likely to beat out Zuffa in the long run….
It’s odd that Steve Cofield would write a story about what a PPV distributor thinks, given the fact that he works for the UFC’s PPV distributor online.
Boxing’s dead, UFC will be on network TV any day, Fedor is/isn’t going to the UFC, *insert promoter* is going to fail, BIG DANA WHITE ANNOUNCEMENT; lord, this is like the MMA Blog Topic Hall of Fame this last week or so.
45 Huddle: very well thought-out, well articulated points. Couldn’t agree more.
It’s unfortunate that Women’s MMA will likely never take off, especially since there is literally one star. If Gina Carano leaves MMA to pursue a TV, movie or modeling gig, the entire venture will fold without her.
It’s too bad…there are some awesome women in MMA who deserve to be spotlighted. Anyone who’s seen Carina Damm fight knows that they can put on just as good a show as the best men in the business.
MMA needs more of one thing: capoeira.
45 Huddle, what other options does Scott Coker have? Or should he and the Showtime executives just be content to be a feeder group for UFC?
“It’s odd that Steve Cofield would write a story about what a PPV distributor thinks, given the fact that he works for the UFC’s PPV distributor online.”
And Ring Magazine is owned by Golden Boy. And ESPN has articles all the time on companies they do business with. Including an almost semi-boycott of the NFL who they don’t do business with. Yada, Yada, Yada….
“45 Huddle, what other options does Scott Coker have? Or should he and the Showtime executives just be content to be a feeder group for UFC?”
He should have signed Kimbo Slice & Tito Ortiz. Especially Tito Ortiz. That’s the guy would could help him compete with the UFC, not Fedor Emelianenko.
And use the girls sparringly, to bring up ratings once in a while. Not as a main event above many more qualified male fights. It’s the same as the freakshow fights in Japan. Once the novelty wears off, you haven’t built a true fanbase, and those eyeballs will leave your program.
Obviously it’s too late to sign Tito Ortiz now….. But they had their chance…. Especially with the Tito/Dana hate going on for so long…
I really don’t think Coker had much of a chance of signing Ortiz to a financially viable deal after UFC 100 happened. At the end of the day, overspending for top name talent is what killed Affliction. By being willing to co-promote with M-1 and Showtime kicking in a ton of money, Fedor’s less of a financial risk to Coker than Ortiz would have been.
“Boxing is dead”. We’ve heard it all before. Boxing isnt dead and having less PPV’s isnt such a bad thing. Cotto v Pacman will do a big number and suddenly this talk of boxing being dead will be over.
He should have signed Kimbo Slice & Tito Ortiz.
But, isn’t he a freakshow? A nondraw? Someone no one will pay money for? I seem to remember these being the problems with Kimbo Slice.
I hope Vadim gets asked about the rumour his M-1 management team mislead Mousasi about UFC’s contract offer to him, their motives for doing it and if it is standard practice at M-1.
Alot of people have the impression that M-1 are real scum-bags, I think this issue with Gegard is a real opportunity to validate this opinion. I hope M-1 gets asked a lot of tough questions in this conferance call, they’ve got it coming…
Another UG rumor becomes legit news by way of consistent repetition. I expect someone to ask Vadim, and the response to be “no, next question”.
This is getting old, guys. What’s next? Chuck Liddell: 30th man in the Royal Rumble?
Typical Alan…
Kimbo Slice, as I have said from the beginning, should not be main eventing ahead of title fights. Nor should he be promoted as the best in the world (like he was). With that said, he is still a draw, which I don’t believe I have ever denied.
Any major signing means they have to put themselves on PPV eventually. This makes them competition to the UFC. So it makes no sense to pay a guy likely over $1 million who is proven not to get casual fans to watch him. They basically started a war with the UFC without the right fighters to do so.
Kimbo Slice has fans. Tito Ortiz, who I said was even more of an important signing, has lots of casual fans. People know who Tito Ortiz is. If you are going to be spending big money anyways, go the extra $1 Million and give yourself a better chance at getting future revenues.
http://www.fightersonlymagazine.co.uk/news/viewarticle.php?id=2859
Mousasi, for his part, certainly not dispel any suspicions.
not dispel any suspicions = did not dispel any suspicions.
Kimbo Slice, as I have said from the beginning, should not be main eventing ahead of title fights. Nor should he be promoted as the best in the world (like he was). With that said, he is still a draw, which I don’t believe I have ever denied.
So, you’re saying Strikeforce should have signed Kimbo Slice and promoted him heavily to sell PPVs? Its a yes or no question. No need for multiple paragraphs.
45: Where to start?
1. Boxing is far from dead. The PPV numbers for the main draws in boxing still match or exceed UFC on their best day. Pacquiao-Cotto will likely do 1.2 million buys if not more. Even Mayweather-JMM will do around 750,000 and JMM is still a fairly unknown quantity to casual fans.
Sure there are piss poor PPVs like the Latin Fury series that Top Rank puts on to sort of rip off the latino boxing fan base (usually by booking Chavez Jr. or one other major latino star versus a bum and then having a bunch of lower ranked fighters of latino descent fill up the rest of the card… $39.95 for that is a total robbery).
But there are UFC cards that aren’t always very good and don’t draw as well either.
In both cases the big names draw out the PPV buyers and the only way anyone can qualify Boxing PPV as dead was if nobody is drawing buys anymore and that simply isn’t true. With the Showtime Super Six around the corner and the big Mayweather and Pacquaio fights coming up, I would say the whole “Boxing is dead” meme is not only premature but 100% flat out wrong.
2. Women’s Boxing didn’t draw for two reasons. The first being that there weren’t a lot of them and there weren’t many that had star potential. The second being that the ones that could have propelled the sport didn’t care about the sport. Namely Laila Ali. She didn’t give a crap about boxing, she just wanted to be famous. And when faced with what would be the challenger that could give her an ass whipping (Ann Wolfe), she ran from the sport.
Christy Martin was the biggest star because there was nobody else. And being promoted on the undercard of a Tyson fight, which usually meant she wasn’t on TV at all or on so early most people weren’t tuned in, did her no favors in her prime.
Women’s fighting has a delicate balance to strike. Fighting is generally a male dominated sport in terms of viewership. The mainstream appeal of UFC is changing this demographic but for other orgs like Strikeforce, they are going to have to play this right by having the right mix of toughness and sexiness, for right or wrong…
What they should do is start to build other female stars, even on the undercard of the CBS show. Erin Toughill fits the Carano mold. Tara La Rosa might for some people and she has the background credibility to go with it. Even using Kim Couture’s name should help. They need to build the challenger to the winner of Cyborg-Carano, not just air it as a one off and forget the division.
Personality draws viewers but narrative keeps them watching. Having say Toughill and La Rosa earlier on the show, with video segments introducing them, etc, keeping them visible on the next few shows to build them to face Carano or Cyborg later would establish some depth and cred in the Women’s Division. The reason it feels like a freak show is that there is nothing behind it. Two stars, a one off match. Nobody ever invested in creating real challengers in Women’s Boxing and in order for Women’s MMA to work there has to be greater depth created in the division… and that means signing the best women and showcasing them.
Your theory of using them “sparingly” would keep your “freak show” theory alive. It would make the division look illegitimate and meant for one fight. If you knew how to build up fights you would propose bulding challengers on the undercard and rounding out the division in the public’s eyes. Of course the whole “Not as a main event above many more qualified male fights” line gives away how you don’t think it should be given a chance to succeed anyway.
3. Tito Ortiz has a win over Forrest Griffin and a draw that should have been a win over Rashad Evans. Neither guy is named Ken Shamrock.
-Rp
Boxing is doing just fine. It doesn’t enjoy the press or monthly ppv or tv numbers mma does. But boxing promoters make a ton of money selling he rights to each fight to dozens of countries. That’s why main eventers in boxing still make way more than Fedor or Brock.
Can we please stop the boxing vs mma thing?