MMA Junkie confirmed with a Strikeforce official that it estimated 11,287 fans attended Saturday’s event at the IZOD Center in New Jersey. If confirmed through the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board, it will be the promotion’s second highest attended show in the past 18 events.
The attendance is a solid number for its debut in New Jersey. The start of the Heavyweight grand prix and return of Fedor Emelianenko helped with the strong figures.
Payout Perspective:
Although the MMA Junkie article stated that estimates had attendance at 13,000, the 11K number is solid for the organization. One of our commenter’s who attended the event reported that it was a pro-Fedor crowd and he received the biggest ovation out of all the fighters. The strong attendance figure shows the popularity of MMA in the New York-New Jersey area. Since MMA is banned in New York, New Jersey will gladly work with Strikeforce or the UFC to run shows like this one.
With Fedor’s elimination from the grand prix, it will be interesting to see fan interest in the rest of the tourney. It’s like the Number 1 seed getting knocked out early. Of course, there’s still Overeem.
Stay tuned for more on the Strikeforce event this week.
Very impressive. If that equates to about 10K payed attendance, than that has to be considered a major success.
I would have to think that they will be disappointed with those numbers. If they had done the normal amount of promotion and done those numbers then I would agree that they should be thrilled. But they held their fan meet and greet, Showtime actually did some advertising, it was advertised on TV and the radio, signs were up around town and Coker was every where. For once they pushed the UFC out of the spot light for a significant length of time.
They are in one of the largest metro areas in North America. Add to that the fact that it was one of the most high profile events SF has done since the early Frank Shamrock shows and I can’t see how they can be any thing but disappointed. Especially when the UFC sold 55,000 tickets in no time flat.
The upside is that the tickets were more expensive than normal. But the bulk of the seats were sold in the upper deck the lower level and floor had almost no ticket sales at all for the last 2 weeks while the big PR push was on.
If the UFC does 2-4 stadium shows a year and has the PPV money how is SF going to compete for talent? This was a very expensive show to put on and it really didn’t do much to move the needle. They could just stay in San Jose and do 9000 with a fraction of the costs and effort.
I hate to be Mr doom and gloom because I really like Strikeforce but the TV numbers are going to need to be amazing for this to be any kind of a success. Unfortunately what I was getting from the forums is that people for the most part were not willing to cough up $15 a month for this. If they didn’t have Showtime already most were just going to watch a stream. In that case how do they succeed with a PPV later on?
As it stands jv, both the UFC and Strikeforce have different business models. But I agree to an extent that the gate didn’t blow away anyone in the SF front office but they would have to be pleased.
Strikeforce did massive promotion for Saturday’s card. Online, they promoted it on random sites. They’re still promoting the replay on Wednesday.
Showtime: I pay for Showtime on Cable but I found my self streaming so I could watch it live. Lame. I’m going to cancel my subscription this week.
Im not sure what the exact gate was for this event but based on the ticket price it probabley wasnt that high. I expected this event to have a huge gate. This was the one place Fedor could draw fans. M-1 has spent many years running their events in NJ. I believe Fedor even ran seminars there. This really should have been a much hotter ticket than it was. I believe M-1s dealing in NJ helped the event as Fedor had more fans in the crowd than normal. I really thought there would be more people in attendance give the cheap ticket price and the history in the area.
BrainSmasher, JV, mmaguru:
The ticket sales did well considering that there is a UFC event just 2 weeks after this card in the same market. In fact, when both tickets went on sale, as of 2 weeks ago, UFC was only up by 1000 more tickets than SF.
It was said that ticket sales were disappointing for the UFC in the area, and is a big reason why the UFC got Jon Jones, who is from the area to replace Evans against Shogun. After the move, UFC was sending messages saying that ticket sales were picking up drastically.
So, for Strikeforce to get 11K + in a market that has a UFC event in less than 2 weeks is pretty darn good. We’ll have to wait on the gate, but I would assume it would do above 500K and if previous trends are true and they played their cards right, very close to a 1 million gate.
Huge viewer numbers. Record breaking… mmajunkie reports:
the Feb. 12 event averaged 741,000 viewers and peaked with 1.1 million for the Antonio Silva vs. Fedor Emelianenko headliner. Both broke Strikeforce’s previous bests on Showtime.
mmaguru:
I had a feeling, and these bodes VERY well for Strikeforce, who didn’t need a Herschel Walker or Gina Carano to do it.
🙂
I will have the payout perspective on the event in within the next day.