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Comments on Dana White’s tirade (again) on Sherdog

By Zach Arnold | December 30, 2009

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Repackaged from an MMA writer that wanted to remain anonymous — and we know how much Dana loves anonymous writers

By Anonymous

Recording and posting that tirade is a pretty blatant attempt by White to publicly embarrass and punk out an MMA writer… again, and yet it’s White who ends up coming off in an embarrassing fashion… again.

What did Jake Rossen write to bring on that onslaught? He said that he doesn’t think MMA is going to be the number one sport in the world in ten years. The ironies are all over the place. White’s entire point of contention is that MMA will be the number one sport in the world in ten years, and yet in the video he demonstrates one of the reasons that it won’t be the number one sport in ten years (his own lack of self-control).

White says right at the beginning that he doesn’t care at all about what Jake Rossen writes, then he goes on and on about what Jake Rossen writes, which is strange for someone who doesn’t give a damn what Jake Rossen writes. His constant passion and obsession of Sherdog is hilarious, but even more hilarious is his Vince Russo-esque INTERNET BUZZ~! fixation. When in doubt, Dana tries to stir up Internet writers to talk about him in hopes that they’ll talk about UFC 108 which they weren’t before. I wonder when he will call MMA writers “Bitches in a Beauty Salon” like he did fighters during the labor dispute with Randy Couture?

He says that Sherdog doesn’t have anything on its site right now “promoting” this weekend’s UFC event, apparently unaware that it’s his job to promote the UFC and it’s the media’s job to cover the sport. Of course, when you think UFC is the whole sport and nothing but the sport, the world revolves around you and not events like the Dynamite!! show that has substantially more meaning for the MMA landscape long-term.

He mocks Jake Rossen for writing that Dubai is having financial troubles, as if it’s an outrageously false statement for Rossen to have made. You would think that someone who is promoting a live event in Dubai on April 10th would have learned by now that the country is going through a lot of well-documented and well-publicized financial problems but apparently not. White says on his video blog that UAE (United Arab Emirates) is worth a trillion dollars, yet doesn’t mention that Dubai leveraged itself into massive debt. He should have called Lorenzo and asked him how leveraging went for Station Casinos.

At one point in the video, the viewer finds out who White is talking to, and thus the point of the whole phone call in the first place. White asks the person on the other end of the line why they employ Rossen, so that means he’s either talking to Jeff Sherwood of Sherdog or he’s talking to the supervisor of ESPN.com’s MMA section. Either way, the message is very clear: Anything that is deemed to be anti-UFC could very well result in a profanity-laced phone call, discouraging you from continuing to post anything anti-UFC or allowing any of your writers to post anything anti-UFC.

I love how the same old publicity stunt got the same old round of publicity after Dana White recently said to the Las Vegas Sun that the UFC will be the biggest sport in the world in ten years. He has found that it gets mainstream media attention whenever he says that, so he says it often. In this magical world of the UFC being the number one sport on the planet, is it going to be number one in 2020? Is he still going to be saying “We’ll be number one in ten years” and getting headlines for saying it in 2013? 2016? The truth is that White doesn’t want or need major-league writers to cover him because if legitimate investigative writers covered him, he wouldn’t have the skin to handle it. He can barely manage the mild media now.

Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 43 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |

43 Responses to “Comments on Dana White’s tirade (again) on Sherdog”

  1. PizzaChef says:

    It looks like Dana is losing it like Vince McMahon. But I still say Dana is more intouch with the real world than Vince. Well slightly anyways.

  2. Chris says:

    Just more nonsense from the mouth of the UFC president. What cracks me up is that people still take anything he has to say seriously, especially when it comes to media members that don’t give the UFC the Kevin Iole treatment.

  3. Mark says:

    I don’t get it. Why would you be mad over something like that? The odds of MMA surpassing soccer (which is watched by billions of people) are beyond impossible. In 100 years it will not surpass soccer and probably not American football, basketball or baseball.

    I also don’t get how you can fly off the handle from saying Sherdog has absolutely no relevance to acting like they just slandered you in front of the whole planet. It is one or the other. I think the online MMA community is completely unimportant to the UFC but very important to everyone else. A negative write-up from even the largest of MMA blogs will not cost them 1 PPV customer. Even their biggest haters buy the shows anyway.

    The truth is that White doesn’t want or need major-league writers to cover him because if legitimate investigative writers covered him, he wouldn’t have the skin to handle it. He can barely manage the mild media now.

    This is 100% the truth. Imagine if a ESPN journalist called him on his bullshit and he went on a verbal tirade calling them a fag or publicly ranting about ESPN making a mistake hiring them. Although he probably wouldn’t be that courageous and would probably do a Vince McMahon and go into crazy bunker-mentality mode telling everybody they’re not allowed to speak to the media anymore because they’re out to persecute the UFC. Dana has been great at getting MMA mainstream, but here is where his flaws could become an issue.

  4. Fluyid says:

    Even after all this time, Dana White is still the same chump who used to post on Fightsport and seek advice for upcoming cards. He’s still the same chump who used to do that shitty Pro Karate Weekly show and bumble over email questions.

    I’ve never believed that everyone should give him so much credit for the UFC hitting it big. He was against the very show (TUF) that caused the UFC to become popular.

  5. Steve4192 says:

    My only problem with Dana’s rant is that is it probably accomplished the exact opposite of what he intended.
    Dana should be smart enough to know that the best way to kill an internet troll is starvation. By replying to Rossen in such an emphatic manner, he just sent thousands of his acolytes scurrying off to Sherdog.com to read Rossen’s article.

    Anyone with a functioning brain should know that Rossen’s sole function at Sherdog’s blog is to generate page hits and clickthroughs, and Dana just guaranteed him a record number in both categories. That rant will not discourage Rossen or Sherdog from doing what they do. Rather, it will encourage them to go even farther out on the ledge to see if they can get Dana to react again.

  6. Mark says:

    I don’t care how big you are, everybody reads feedback on themselves. President Obama reads op-ed columns about himself, Bill Gates searches for Microsoft criticism (via Bing of course), and Dana is certainly a mark for himself and does care what people say online. But the difference between he and most other people is he can’t let it roll off of his back or at least not rant about it in public. He has no maturity.

  7. 45 Huddle says:

    I thought the tirade was funny. Of all the MMA websites, Sherdog is constantly the best at beating up Zuffa. They constantly hype up non Zuffa cards beyond what they should be. Their articles are constantly biased. Most people on The UG laugh at how bad Sherdog is, and those are the long time fans….

    So Dana White basically says the same thing as most of these fans, and somehow he is in the wrong? Jake Rossen along with the rest of that staff has been a joke for years.

    And I don’t think this has to do with Pro vs. Anti UFC. Not even for Dana White. I think he sees the same crap from the same website year after year.

    Josh Gross obviously has a grudge against Zuffa and continues to write slanted articles about them. He use to work for Sherdog. His suggestions on how the sport should be changed would actually cripple the sport.

    Jeff Sherwood had/has a grudge with Dana White for years.

    Jake Rossen is Mr. Negative about anything Zuffa.

    Loretta Hunt had a good streak of completely one sided articles, including her claim that a woman’s fight would be more important then UFC 100. If that didn’t show her bias, I don’t know what did.

    Jordan Breem is a MMA snob who during a good UFC PPV will spend the first 20 minutes of Beatdown After The Bell talking about only the negative aspects of the event.

    Hmmmm…. I wonder why Dana White is pissed.

    There are schills on the other side of the equation as well. Kevin Iole has Dana’s dick in his mouth with every article he writes.

    The guys covering MMA in general are a joke. On both sides of the equation, 90% of them deserve to get a reeming like this one.

    Now, putting it on a video blog… That just isn’t the brightest idea….

  8. 45 Huddle says:

    Let me also say this…. Dana White needs to stop doing these sort of video blogs. The blogs were he does normal stuff is fine. When he gets all angry, he should keep that on the editting room floor. With that said, if I am Dana White…. I would be pissed.

    In most other sports, the writers UNDERSTAND THE BUSINESS. The guys covering baseball on ESPN know the business. They understand how the contracts work. They understand how the business is structured. They understand how the agents work. They have relationships with individuals at all levels of the game.

    The MMA media and it’s fanbase is generally a bunch of retards who write opinionatd pieces from their computers without doing much (if any) leg work to get a story. Even us here at Fight Opinion don’t REALLY UNDERSTAND the business. We like to pretend we do and base opinions on this. But we really don’t know that much. We don’t have a real basis for the reasoning behind most of the UFC’s actions. We can make them out to be villians when something sounds wrong, but we really don’t know what happened behind the scenes to make it an issue.

    Of course Dana White doesn’t help the issues sometimes because he acts immature in public about it, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is basically nobody out there who really understands MMA in the media.

    So when people bash Dana White and the UFC…. They really aren’t in a position to do so. This will always create a lot of conflict.

    Until we see reporters really doing leg work. Until we see them going out there and getting the stories…. This conflict will continue to happen.

  9. Fluyid says:

    You’re the best, 45 Huddle.

    “Most people on The UG laugh at how bad Sherdog is, and those are the long time fans….

    So Dana White basically says the same thing as most of these fans, and somehow he is in the wrong?

    If he’s following the general UG line of thinking, then yes, he is wrong.

  10. Fluyid says:

    ^ That may have come across as unnecessarily sarcastic. I enjoy your posts, 45 Huddle. That’s all I meant to say.

  11. zY says:

    I was with you until you started ranting about Dubai. Last I checked Abu Dhabi =/= Dubai, and considering the event is in Abu Dhabi…yeah. Do you normally confuse states? Is new York synonymous with california?

    Nobody brought up Dubai except you.

  12. Mark says:

    Nobody says Dana doesn’t have the right to be pissed off, but he looks like a total idiot when he has spent the past 2 years (since revoking Sherdog’s UFC show access after the K-1 Dynamite USA show) telling anyone who will listen how unimportant they are. If something is unimportant, then who cares if they promote you or not? He has repeatedly said they and their message board users are in the minority of UFC fans (which is true) so he discounts their opinions that UFC isn’t the #1 MMA promotion in the world. He’s right to hold that view that since they haven’t mattered to the UFC in 5 years and more than likely won’t ever again if the company stays at least half as successful as they are now. But why then turn around and give them credibility? That’s what it boils down to. He could have ignored this and it would have gone as unnoticed as every other Rossen column, but he made it an issue for no logical reason.

    Also, turning around and bashing pro-UFC writers is pretty comical. Clearly online writers have to write the MMA version of Pravda to even have UFC give you much of anything beyond access to be able to record video interviews with undercard fighters (which will probably be the next banning) and when you don’t get that you’re anti-UFC. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Sherdog is evil for giving smaller organizations some press that actually need it (and UFC hasn’t needed it in 5 years) but if you report what Dana tells you like Meltzer you’re a hack. Is there any middle ground? You want leg work but everybody is too afraid to go on the record to piss off the dictator, but if you report the softball news he does allow to get out you’re wrong for doing that too.

  13. Alan Conceicao says:

    Dana White doesn’t want writers who “know the business” unless they work for Yahoo and get information directly from HQ. Which is fine as something he may want, but completely unrealistic, and also wildly humorous when you see the end result.

    The whole thing is funny: Jake Rossen is a terrible writer, UFC 108 is a terrible PPV, and I think the e-media is terribly lazy and dependent on stuff like this in lieu of actual reporting.

  14. zY says:

    Also, to he guy shilling the UG.

    If you wanna point out some pretentious MMA snobs, look no further than the U fucking G. All I ever hear is about how great that place is, yet every time I go there it’s the same inane bullshit you’ll find on any other website. Same retarded threads, same trolls, same terrible articles. The only difference is the UG has the absolute worst forum software in existence compounding the problem.

    It’s actually pretty hilarious how the entirety of the UG seems to have a collective Napoleon Complex. I avoid that place like the plague.

  15. 45 Huddle says:

    “Sherdog is evil for giving smaller organizations some press that actually need it (and UFC hasn’t needed it in 5 years) but if you report what Dana tells you like Meltzer you’re a hack. Is there any middle ground? “

    1) Giving press to a smaller organization is not the problem. It’s the depth of press they give them compared to the UFC coverage. I say compared to the UFC because they are the main company of the sport and every other organization is judged compared to them. They even went as far as devoting one of their staff members to IFL events only. They have also covered lesser events like they were huge shows when they didn’t have any meaningful fights on them.

    2) There is a middle ground, but it takes WORK and EFFORT. All these guys online want to act like they know the entire sport. They don’t. Best way to start off is with a local area. Know those gyms very well and work your way up. Become freelance (even if it is for free) for one of the websites and only cover those gyms you are familiar with. Once you build the credibility as being a reliable writer, then you can branch out.

    Right now we have all these experts online who don’t talk to the gyms, don’t ask the tough questions of the fighters, and then have the STRONGEST opinions on topics.

    Having an opinion is fine. But guys like Rossen have no business having their content being streamlined to ESPN. ESPN outsourced to a bunch of amateurs….

  16. Fluyid says:

    ^ I stopped going there nearly three years ago. I haven’t even been back one time.

  17. Mark says:

    UG got respect for having fighters break news on there, but Twitter has replaced that. Now they just have a few people who claim to be “insiders” who take a few lucky guesses, have a 17% success track record and rubes believe them. They’re the same people who used to believe people who claimed they were celebrities in chat rooms in the 90s.

  18. Alan Conceicao says:

    Right now we have all these experts online who don’t talk to the gyms, don’t ask the tough questions of the fighters, and then have the STRONGEST opinions on topics.

    Jesus, when 45 and I espouse the same opinion of MMA writers in the week, something is wrong.

  19. Fluyid says:

    “They’re the same people who used to believe people who claimed they were celebrities in chat rooms in the 90s.”

    I wish Machine May would come back!!!

  20. 45 Huddle says:

    Perhaps I shouldn’t have used The UG as an example. Most MMA websites laugh at Sherdog for how bad they are, not just The Underground.

    I would have to agree with people’s opinions on The UG website now. Back in the day, it was THE website to go to for information. It is a sad place to go to now. I probably look at it a few times per month to see if there is anything interesting…. but mostly out of habit…

  21. edub says:

    Man you writers are funny. Dana goes after one of you and its heyyy lets dissect everything he says. I obviously don’t side with Dana, but I really dont take anything he says to heart.

    Its funny how you point out its not sherdogs job to promote his company, yet they have gone out of there way to promote any event that isn’t UFC. I mean they even had a sub page for the strikeforce event recently. They have obvious anti-UFC sentiment and it shows thru there day to day articles. IMO it would have been a lot better if ESPN aligned itself with Junkie or Cage potato.

  22. Mark says:

    1) Giving press to a smaller organization is not the problem. It’s the depth of press they give them compared to the UFC coverage. I say compared to the UFC because they are the main company of the sport and every other organization is judged compared to them. They even went as far as devoting one of their staff members to IFL events only. They have also covered lesser events like they were huge shows when they didn’t have any meaningful fights on them.

    Why does UFC need it? They’re featured on practically every internet sports site, including television networks and newspaper sites. Strikeforce gets significantly less coverage and will give sites all the access they need to fighters and events. Since the internet fanbase are all hardcore fans who like Strikeforce as much as they like the UFC, why wouldn’t you devote more time to the organization that you can get more out of that posting fight results, the same press conference video everybody has and maybe a few video interviews with prelim fighters? And Dana complaining about this would be just as ridiculous as James Cameron throwing a hissyfit that Ain’t It Cool or Rotten Tomatoes didn’t give enough coverage to Avatar: it doesn’t need it, it has a mainstream multi-million dollar advertising budget behind it.

    2) There is a middle ground, but it takes WORK and EFFORT. All these guys online want to act like they know the entire sport. They don’t. Best way to start off is with a local area. Know those gyms very well and work your way up. Become freelance (even if it is for free) for one of the websites and only cover those gyms you are familiar with. Once you build the credibility as being a reliable writer, then you can branch out.

    Nobody wants to go on the record about anything because they are petrified Dana will find out and raise hell. Sites do get softball interviews with fighters. I don’t know of any big name fighters outside of Brock Lesnar I haven’t see Sherdog or MMAWeekly post a video interview for. But they know that if they ask tough questions they’re going to get brickwalled or get an off-the-record answer and posting “one anonymous fighter said….” is so easy for UFC to laugh off it’s not even worth the trouble of posting it.

    Right now we have all these experts online who don’t talk to the gyms, don’t ask the tough questions of the fighters, and then have the STRONGEST opinions on topics.

    Speaking of people with strong opinions, how many fighters do you talk to before you write more than even Zach daily on topics you’re looking at from the outside? Seriously, do you think every sports writer talks to NFL players or executives?

    Having an opinion is fine. But guys like Rossen have no business having their content being streamlined to ESPN. ESPN outsourced to a bunch of amateurs….

    No, ESPN outsourced to a bunch of people you don’t like (which is pretty much everybody but MMALogic online.) They and other major outlets who hired internet writers had no choice since their current reporters knew nothing about MMA and couldn’t correctly cover it. And the ones that did showed such distain for the sport it was pointless.

  23. edub says:

    Oh and Dynamite has two maybe three fights that have more meaning on the mma landscape. Aoki-Hirota; Kawajiri-Yokota(maybe) and Manhoef-(Grabaka Hit man)cannot for the life of me think of his name…but I wouldn’t call any of those more relevant than Evans vs. Silva.
    Your bias is showing.

  24. Mark says:

    *disdain, not distain (dis stain?)

  25. edub says:

    I think he meant “this jane”.

  26. Alan Conceicao says:

    Dynamite, to be fair, is pretty important to Japanese MMA. Like, really important. The survival of MMA long term probably hinges on its success or failure. Like, obviously UFC 100 didn’t determine the best heavyweight in the world, nor did the TUF 1 Finale feature the best light heavyweights in the world, but they definitely went pretty far in determining the growth of MMA in the US.

  27. 45 Huddle says:

    “Why does UFC need it? They’re featured on practically every internet sports site, including television networks and newspaper sites. Strikeforce gets significantly less coverage and will give sites all the access they need to fighters and events.”

    They cover the sport for MMA not for some niche website anymore. What the cover and the quantity and quality of it both matters. Covering Strikeforce as much as the UFC is garbage.

    And your missing my point about journalists doing hard work with local camps. The point is that it’s a way for them to understand the sport better. Like an apprenticeship. Even if it’s not for publishing an article and it’s off the record… It’s valuable learning. Right now we have a bunch of guys not doing that and having strong opinions without that underlying knowledge of the sport. The guys ESPN has for their major sports all started off at a local level and took that knowledge when they went to the national stage as a journalist. We are not seeing that with MMA writers.

    “Speaking of people with strong opinions, how many fighters do you talk to before you write more than even Zach daily on topics you’re looking at from the outside? Seriously, do you think every sports writer talks to NFL players or executives?”

    I am writing my OPINION on a blog. If I was writing an article, both my tone and my fact checking would be WAY DIFFERENT. There is a certain standard an article should be up to…

    And last time I checked, at the end of a baseball game, there are like 20 reporters in the locker room. Those guys are around their sport CONSTANTLY. They are constantly in contact with their contacts. That is not happening with most MMA writers.

  28. 45 Huddle says:

    They cover the sport for ESPN….

  29. edub says:

    Dynamite, to be fair, is pretty important to Japanese MMA. Like, really important. The survival of MMA long term probably hinges on its success or failure. Like, obviously UFC 100 didn’t determine the best heavyweight in the world, nor did the TUF 1 Finale feature the best light heavyweights in the world, but they definitely went pretty far in determining the growth of MMA in the US.

    Ah good point Alan I was thinking about it in more of a rankings related way.

  30. Alan Conceicao says:

    I mean, I get the point that UFC 108 is, perhaps, a more relevant card right this moment in terms of rankings: It for sure is. And it, I think, unquestionably has better MMA fights than K-1 Dynamite. But if UFC 108 bombs or is wildly successful, it won’t change the way the UFC does business. I think they know their own business well enough at this point and comprehend that they will sell more PPVs with good shows than bad ones, even if bad ones are still popular enough to make money. UFC 108, in that sense, is generaly irrelevant. In turn that forces writers who’s primary interest in MMA is in its ability to make money to try and ascribe it some value for the purpose of having something to write; i.e. it potentially being the slippery slope to crappy PPVs.

  31. edub says:

    Kazuo Misaki!!! ahhh that feels better.

  32. jr says:

    Dana’s at Howard Hughes in his hotel room level crazy

  33. Mark says:

    They cover the sport for MMA not for some niche website anymore. What the cover and the quantity and quality of it both matters. Covering Strikeforce as much as the UFC is garbage.

    What major UFC story has Sherdog ever ignored? They report every relevant UFC news story. You would have a point if they were outright ignoring UFC events because they want to pay more attention to DREAM or something. They give as much coverage as you can with the limited access UFC allows them. If you can point out something Sherdog or MMAWeekly or Bloody Elbow neglected to report that Yahoo or UFC.com had to I’d love to hear it.

    And your missing my point about journalists doing hard work with local camps. The point is that it’s a way for them to understand the sport better. Like an apprenticeship. Even if it’s not for publishing an article and it’s off the record… It’s valuable learning. Right now we have a bunch of guys not doing that and having strong opinions without that underlying knowledge of the sport. The guys ESPN has for their major sports all started off at a local level and took that knowledge when they went to the national stage as a journalist. We are not seeing that with MMA writers.

    They do talk to fighters. There are countless “we talked to Fighter X from his training camp about his upcoming UFC fight” stories on Sherdog and if they don’t talk to the fighter himself they talk to his trainer. Look at the Sherdog archive if you don’t believe me. But, again, anything and everything can piss of Dana White so everybody is paranoid and keep interviews to superficial levels. I don’t want to sound like a Sherdog fan, because I am not. But people expecting UFC employees to say anything out of line are like those expecting people behind the Iron Curtain to speak ill of the USSR. Except Stalin doesn’t have you killed Dana ruins your career. And I don’t even agree with whoever wrote that “we can’t lose access” comment a few days ago, but I see where they are coming from.

    I am writing my OPINION on a blog. If I was writing an article, both my tone and my fact checking would be WAY DIFFERENT. There is a certain standard an article should be up to…

    And in this case Jake Rossen writes columns, not news pieces. He too was giving his opinion and opinions even from major sports columnists tend to piss those they write about off. That is all this is.

    And last time I checked, at the end of a baseball game, there are like 20 reporters in the locker room. Those guys are around their sport CONSTANTLY. They are constantly in contact with their contacts. That is not happening with most MMA writers.

    The UFC’s restriction on the press is much more severe than baseball’s. They had to be forced to allow their managers and agents in dressing rooms.

    The problem is “most MMA writers” are not professionals. The majority do this as a hobby because you can’t make money on the internet otherwise every MMA fan would quit their job and write online. The ones that are have pissed Dana White off for writing something criticizing the UFC and I’m sure the cold shoulder is contagious so expecting

  34. Zack says:

    I haven’t read the whole thread yet, but I don’t understand how disagreeing that MMA will be the biggest sport in 10 years is being anti-UFC. It’s being realistic.

    All you need is one dude with a ball in a group of poor kids and you can play soccer. Or you can roll together a bunch of rags or use an empty plastic container and play some variation of it. The sport of MMA has a ton of costs associated with it which will keep it from being the biggest.

  35. Alan Conceicao says:

    Well, on one hand, its sorta silly to write another story about how it won’t be the biggest sport. Like, we all know it won’t be. We’ve even heard this pitch before. On the other, its equally silly to just repeat this stuff ad nauseum. Dana White will soon be talking about running MMA events on Mars and we’ll have semiserious commentary about it.

  36. Zack says:

    “The MMA media and it’s fanbase is generally a bunch of retards who write opinionatd pieces from their computers without doing much (if any) leg work to get a story. Even us here at Fight Opinion don’t REALLY UNDERSTAND the business. We like to pretend we do and base opinions on this. But we really don’t know that much. We don’t have a real basis for the reasoning behind most of the UFC’s actions. We can make them out to be villians when something sounds wrong, but we really don’t know what happened behind the scenes to make it an issue.”

    No…that’s just you. You wrote a long rant talking shit about Sherdog but look at how much content they have on their website. There are a million video interviews and they’re constantly in fighter gyms.

    And just cuz you’re some lonely guy in his mid 40s who retired from a website’s message section, only to come back with a new XXXTREME persona (talking about dicks, condoms, and fucking) doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t know people within the industry.

  37. Mark says:

    Exactly. And comparing MMA to ball sports media is bad anyway you look at it. MMA magazines struggle, most writers do it for free and the ones that do get paid certainly aren’t making a living exclusively from it. I don’t know about Rossen & Gross’s situations. But I am sure they don’t get paid the same amount of money ESPN’s baseball journalists get. Iole does more with Yahoo besides MMA coverage (assuming he doesn’t have a side job) and Dave Meltzer makes money from subscriptions to his newsletter and before it took off had a newspaper job. You just can’t expect MMA to suddenly be at a level where people are handing out money to cover it as heavily as ball sports when it was a fringe sport 6 years ago.

  38. Isaiah says:

    The funniest thing about this whole situation is that Rossen is normally a total Zuffa shill.

  39. Mike says:

    If Dana doesn’t want to get ridiculed for saying something stupid, he shouldn’t say something stupid.

    The UFC is currently not even as big (in any way) AS ONE SINGLE FOOTBALL CLUB, in the form of Man United for example. To say it will be the biggest sport in the world, even if you don’t actually believe it, just shows how little he knows about football/soccer.

    The TV rights for the Premier League top 2 billion pounds over a term of I think 3 years, with turnover of £2bn per year. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8078533.stm

    I believe the UFCs turnover is in the region of 250m per year, which is around the same figure as Man United alone. Similarly, in terms of wages, just the Premier League pays out £1bn per year.

    So if not financial, then is the UFC going to be bigger attendance wise? Obviously not, given that Man United bring in 80k every other weekend in the league and then midweeks in Europe and the cups. The UFC does 10k (paid), twice a month at most. So the UFC is not even close to one single club.

    Every single weekend in just England, about 350,000 people turn up to Premier League games, then there are another 6 or 7 tiers of English football who attract as many again (put together). That is just one country. Football is the national sport in what? 50 countries? At least 20 countries have 20,000 attendances every single weekend for multiple clubs. So every weekend, probably 250 million people watch football/soccer either on TV or in person.

    I am an MMA fan. MMA will never be 10% of the size of soccer, in terms of finances, attendances or TV viewing. Every time Dana makes that statement to any journalist with any knowledge, they will think he is a complete idiot. If they don’t know what they’re talking about either though, they might print it.

    I read Rossen’s post after seeing the tirade and he misses the point completely too, by the way.

  40. Zheroen says:

    WHY DON’T SOME PEOPLE LIKE THE SAME THINGS I LIKE, IT’S UNFAIR

  41. Dave says:

    “The MMA media and it’s fanbase is generally a bunch of retards who write opinionatd pieces from their computers without doing much (if any) leg work to get a story.”

    45, I know I speak only for myself, but christ you are wrong. I mainly stick to kickboxing but within like 6 months of doing so I have like a billion contacts in Europe and Japan and even if I post something that is a rumor or somebody claiming one side or another, I make sure to get confirmation from other sources if I’m not going to post it with a bunch of disclaimers.

    There is a problem with them being opinionated, of course, but the other side of the coin is any sort of mainstream coverage is done by non-fans with no actual knowledge of the sport.

  42. smoogy says:

    I find it funny how 45 Huddle thinks none of us should “bash” the UFC because we don’t REALLY UNDERSTAND how the business works, and in the same breath takes a shit on all MMA journalists based on his assumptions of how things work. Classic stuff.

    Of course, I don’t disagree that there are tons of lazy parasites covering the sport. I think Alan summed up the situation as succinctly as possible:

    “Jake Rossen is a terrible writer, UFC 108 is a terrible PPV, and the e-media is terribly lazy and dependent on stuff like this in lieu of actual reporting.”

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