Jeff Cain of MMAWeekly reports on the latest discussions surrounding the UFC taking The Ulimate Fighter on the road and making it a truly international series.
“We’re working on taking it international. We’re working on that right now,” UFC president Dana White revealed following UFC 110 in Australia on Feb. 20. “We’ve got a couple of countries nailed down that we’re definitely going to do.”
Finishing filming of it’s eleventh season this week, “The Ultimate Fighter” will still continue it’s successful run in the U.S., but the plan is to cultivate talent and stars worldwide.
“We’re going to keep it in America. It will still be going strong in America. We just had our best season ever last season, and it was Season 10,” said White.
“I’ll tell you what my goal is and what my ultimate dream is, is that we have ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ going on everywhere, in every country, and continue to grow talent in all these different places. But first we have to come in and do like we did in Australia, and what we did in the U.K.,” added the UFC president.
“You move into these markets. You infect it. After you have an event, that’s when everything starts to spill over and people are buzzing and talking about it.”
The ninth season of the reality television series “United States vs. United Kingdom” pitted U.S. fighters against U.K. fighters, but the plan now is to have contestants from a particular nation make up the full cast.
Payout Perspective:
The Ultimate Fighter has been a great promotional tool for the UFC; not just in the sense that it’s pushed viewers to the PPV product, but also because it’s driven interest in a host of key personalities. Everyone talks about the success of winners like Forrest Griffin, Rashad Evans, Michael Bisping (even some of the coaches), but the series has also done wonders for Dana White as the figurehead of the UFC.
International versions of TUF should be just as effective. Further upside to taking the series abroad is that the much-maligned format shouldn’t be an issue in these new markets.
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