Ian Mallon: The $21b merger of WWE and UFC - where Graham Boylan sits within sport’s richest deal
The $21b merger of WWE and UFC - where Graham Boylan sits within sport’s richest deal.
THE Forbes rich list for the most valuable live sports and entertainment organisations will have a new lead business when it publishes its latest index.
Liberty Media – co-owner of Six Nations Rugby and its $17.2 billion evaluation – is set to be replaced at the top by Endeavour Group Holdings and its newly minted, $21.5 billion merger of WWE and UFC.
The deal brings together two of the world’s leading combat sports under the one umbrella of sport’s most valuable organisation, with a combined $12.1 billion (UFC) and $9.4 billion (WWE) worth of assets.
Within the hierarchy on the UFC side of the package sits Cork man Graham Boylan, the owner of what is effectively ‘the UFC draft’, the $25m Cage Warriors brand, an independent but intrinsically linked organisation.
The latest round of valuations demonstrates that Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) - “not everybody’s cup of tea” as Boylan happily attests - is now one of the most powerful and valuable sports in the world.
The explosion in value of combat sports is down to a youth market – now young adults who used to play MMA games on their Xboxes and PlayStations – with bags of expendable cash.
Despite the squeamishness of many traditional sports fans and sponsors, who Boylan says “will not touch blood sports” the reality is of a sport that “has no downside” with the right commercial partners and that now grown-up global audience.
To capitalise further on the explosion of MMA Boylan is set to cast the sport further into the public arena later this year with a heavily budgeted fly-on-the-wall docuseries, the rights of which are currently being negotiated with Netflix, Amazon and others.
The MMA Fight Academy is a show which will be based on the successful ‘The Contender’ boxing series from MGM in 2005 with Sugar Ray Leonard and Sylvester Stallone as mentors, which was the standard bearer for the current wave of reality-style sports programming.
One of its producers, Sasha Bushell, has been brought in by Boylan’s team to give a similar treatment to the MMA Fight Academy which will bring 24 of the world’s best young fighters to California for a production which will elevate the sport like no other.
On the live platforms Cage Warriors now beams events into “180 million homes across 110 countries” but where the ambition is for further growth and more content.
All major streaming services cannot get enough live sports in the highly competitive broadcasting marketplace – where in combat sports, UFC Fight Pass is the market leader.
Boylan’s story as an unemployed school dropout from North Mon in Cork was told by the Irish Examiner in 2019, and while he sits under Dana White of the UFC in terms of power, his impact since taking over Cage Warriors in 2010 has been astonishing.
Building respectability and creditability through enhanced medical standards, a board which includes business brains from Spotify and other blue chip companies, as well as unleashing Conor McGregor on the world, Boylan’s key focus has been sports rights and audience.
As a result such high demand for his fighters has seen a sport “that is only moving in an upward direction” and his big challenge is keeping supply up with demand.
“That live sports (segment) is something that Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Paramount, Warner Brothers (and all major streamers and broadcasters) all want to own,” he explains.
Now it’s all about the shows he can put on - currently just shy of 20 in Europe (with two in Dublin this year), and six so far on the US West Coast – with that number set to surge in the coming years.
While UFC Fight Pass is the golden ticket – each broadcast deal done is one that represents growth which is so dear to Boylan’s heart - no matter the territory, whether it be Indonesia or Ireland.
“The key thing is that we’re always organically growing and we’ve cautiously kept every penny a prisoner to grow the organisation,” he explains.
“It’s a chicken and egg scenario, if you don’t put on the big show you don’t get the media deals that you need, and the fighters as well need these deals to develop into big names on that platform of exposure.”
So how does co-existing with UFC work, where one brand is very definitely the dominant force and the other always destined to be in second place?
“We’re writing the playbook here – but the best way to explain where we sit is that we are the Draft for the UFC,” he explains. “They come along once a year and the best players get drafted to the bigger leagues – it’s hard to deny any other analogy that Cage Warriors are the draft of the MMA, because the biggest names and stars are drafted to the biggest platform, which is the UFC.
“UFC is like the mothership which flies over, sucks up our talent and flies off,” says Boylan.
“The biggest thing in this sport is understanding where you sit in the hierarchy - we understand our position in the sport, we know what we are.”
Cage Warriors 153 takes place at the 3Arena on April 29 with a main event that sees the welterweight title unification between champion Rhys McKee and interim champion Jim Wallhead.
ONE of the founders of Paddy Power has said that Bet365 “would have known” it was facilitating an “out of control gambler, but did nothing” following our revelations last week about the UK operator’s behaviour in the Irish market.
The Pitch revealed how the company watched repeatedly as a chronic gambler logged onto his account shortly after midnight, on the 18th day of every month (payday) and gambled for up to 22 hours, losing €64,000 in the process.
In one splurge on February 18 of this year, the man endured a 39-bet losing streak, one of his final benders before bailiffs were called over €25k in rent arrears.
Once his family were made aware of the situation they discovered the company had never carried out an income audit nor did it raise any red flags despite such catastrophic patterns.
Stewart Kenny, co-founders of Paddy Power with John Corcoran and David Power in 1988, said the story demonstrates that despite all of the noise from the gambling industry since the announcement of the Gambling Regulation Act in 2021, nothing much has changed.
“With the patterns you (The Pitch) showed about this person and his gambling splurges, starting on the same day every month, especially as his splurges started at midnight – Bet365 would have known he was out of control but did nothing,” said Kenny who is now involved in ‘Stop Gambling Harm’.
“The betting industry is big on PR talk about what they are doing concerning what they describe as ‘Responsible Gambling’, but evidence like this shows they are not actually doing much about Gambling Addiction other than ‘PR Talk’ to make themselves look good.
“The new Gambling Legislation (Act) should force the industry to implement mandatory deposit limits and also to make it mandatory to email out statements of a customer’s deposits and losses/gains every month, just like other financial institutions.
“The industry should also be forced by legislation to separate the sports book site from the highly addictive online casino site.”
VOLLEYBALL Ireland will call on local councils and authorities to provide land for volleyball courts in parks and on beaches across the country, as part of a plan to grow the game.
The organisation aims to more than double its licensed player numbers from under 2,000 currently to 5,000 by 2026.
Its strategic plan is heavily pointed towards facilities, and in particular the establishment of 50 courts developed on public land around the country.
CEO of Volleyball Ireland Gary Stewart told The Pitch: “We will be launching a community facilities development campaign next month, to encourage councils to install beach and park volleyball courts.”
Such an initiative, he explains, “doesn’t cost them anything, we pay – we just need the land – it’s a no brainer”.
AHEAD of this weekend’s Aintree Grand National, the Irish equivalent pulled in an impressive number of viewers for coverage of this year’s race from Fairyhouse. RTÉ Sport's two days of coverage from the Easter Festival finished with a peak viewing audience of 348,000 people watching live on RTÉ2 as Paul Townend steered I Am Maximus to victory for JP McManus in the Irish Grand National on Monday.
