UFC moving to Australia? | Thebigtip

By Simon Black and Michelle Loh @ News.com.au

The Ultimate Fighting Championship has revealed a multi-pronged plan to grow its brand Down Under with one executive calling Australia "pound for pound" its biggest market in the world.

Driving this aggressive expansion is the popularity of the UFC's events in Australia, which have drawn crowds willing to pay big dollars to watch the fights in the flesh.

Tickets to UFC 127, held in Sydney last Sunday, sold out in 30 minutes, a global record for the sport, with 18,186 spectators paying between $500 and $1500 for tickets with total gate sales of $3.5 million.

And this for a card that features fighters who are not household names.

To put that in context, it would take boxing superstars like Anthony Mundine and Danny Green to have any hope of a boxing event attracting a similar size crowd.

"Pound for pound this is our biggest market," managing director of UFC's international development, Marshall Zelaznik, said.

"The sky feels like it's the limit for us.

"Where else can we go as a company on a Sunday morning, afternoon and sell 18,000 tickets? I think that about sums it up.

He said Australians seemed to have a particular affinity for the sport.

"I think it's the open-mindedness to contact sport, and it's a very physical culture," he said.

"I don't think this culture pre-judges anything and they're super-big sports fans."

Health experts label cage-fighting 'barbaric'

While the sport is popular with fans, medical experts say participants could face debilitating long-term health effects and would like to see more studies before the sport is embraced as mainstream.

The Australian Medical Association's emergency medicine spokesperson, associate professor David Mountain, labelled the sport “barbaric”, saying it has “no place in a modern, civilised society”.

He said there was no incentive for organisations like the UFC to look into the long-term health effects of the sport.

“I doubt whether there are many people within the sport who are interested in doing longitudinal studies,” he said.

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