PPV In Combat Sports: Why?

PPV In Combat Sports: Why?

The recent decision by BT Sport to start showing some numbered UFC events on their PPV platform has been met with widespread criticism, and in my opinion deservedly so.

I don’t see why combat sports, specifically boxing or MMA, are treated differently to every other sport in the UK market.

We pay a subscription to the likes of BT Sport and Sky, and we should expect content to be served up to us as part of that subscription, otherwise what’s the point of it.

Sky are not expecting us to pay extra for the cricket World Cup, or certain Grand Prix races or certain Premier League football games, so why is boxing or MMA different.

We pay our licence fee, which we have no say on, and the BBC don’t charge us extra for Wimbledon, the World Snooker Championships or even for the World Cup, the Olympics and so on.

Dillian Whyte against Oscar Rivas is our next boxing PPV ‘extravaganza’, with the co-main of David Price and Dave Allen, which is the equivalent of John L Gardner vs Noel Quarless, for those of ever advancing years like myself.

Whyte is most people’s 5th best heavyweight in the world, Rivas wouldn’t make many top 10 lists. According to Boxing Monthly, Price and Allen are only the 8th and 10th best heavyweights in the UK.

Yet this is on PPV when quite rightly many subscribers would think it should be part of their monthly subscription.

BT have recently given us Terrence Crawford and Amir Khan and Tyson Fury against Tom Schwarz as their most recent PPV shows. Fury and Schwarz was about as competitive as me trying to tell the wife we are not watching Love Island tonight, yet we were expected to pay extra for it.

The likes of Fury and Whyte demand certain hourly rates and good luck to them, but it should be about value for money. We pay our subscriptions for a reason and have every right to expect a certain quality of product, and more so, not to pay extra for any half decent fight.

The decision by BT Sport to test the waters with the UFC on PPV is extremely worrying. MMA is still a niche product, a sport that is still growing, limiting the eyes who view your product stunts the growth, more so if people are cancelling their regular subscriptions in protest, which seems to be the case.

It will as ever come down to profit margins, will the extra revenue from PPV compensate for the cancelled subscriptions. BT Sport will undoubtedly be prepared to take a hit initially, short-term pain for long- term gain.

I doubt it will be a one-off despite the backlash, expect at least a few more before the year ends. The expectation is it will be 4 UFC PPV’s a year, pretty soon 4 will become 6, if it works it will be milked to death.

BT Sport will hope that eventually the fans submit and tap on the buy button, the fans might have to except that to win the war, a great deal of patience and sacrifice is needed, who blinks first.