Opinion: Studies are Neat, but MMA is Still Not Your Dad's Sport

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.

* * *
This week, the Sports Business Journal published a neat little study on television sports watchers, noting that, surprise surprise, that audience is getting older. Fast fact: did you know the median age of an Ultimate Fighting Championship fan is roughly 49 years old? I thought boxing was what my parents preferred. I thought the UFC was, in fact, “as real as it gets.” Was I mistaken?

As interesting as the SBJ's article is, no. You and I, our own perceptions and all existing anecdotal evidence suggest that what we know holds true: middle-aged divorcees in the management class are part of the mixed martial arts landscape, but it's still the 18-34 demographic that runs this sport. MMA may not be “cool” like it was in the Affliction T-shirt era, but MMA is still not “your dad's sport,” at least not necessarily.

The study was conducted for the SBJ by Magna Global and measured TV watchers of various sports -- don't you dare not consider professional wrestling a sport -- from 2000 to 2016. While 2000 data was unavailable for the UFC given that the date falls within the established “the Dark Ages” of MMA, the report shows that in 2006, the median age of a UFC watcher was 34 years old and as of last year, it was suddenly 49. Any statistical jump like that is going to raise an eyebrow and seem like an intriguing story, but while it may seem confusing at first, it really just confirms what we know: MMA's most ardent fanbase is still fairly young and internet savvy.

In the time from 2006 to 2016, the UFC has gone from its ethos-informing launching point of Spike to Fox, mostly Fox Sports 1, plus its own digital content platform UFC Fight Pass. Spike has availability in 98.7 million American homes, not to mention its wide distribution in Canada. FS1 is available in just under 85 million homes, has lost roughly 5 million homes since its launch less than four years ago and has struggled to find its cable sports identity outside of the UFC's programming, coupled with NASCAR and Major League Soccer. Plus, at no point does the SBJ report mention cord-cutting, despite the fact it has become such an entrenched concept, at least in meta-sports discussion, that I feel comfortable not explaining it. This is as close to the SBJ article comes to hitting on the concept:

“We know that people are going to consume our content differently, not just through broadcast or on one device,” [NBA Chief Marketing Officer Pam] El said. “We know how millennials consume content and we have developed our offerings to meet that demand. You go where they go and you will attract fans in that age group.”

First of all, this is amusing and ironic given how many years the NBA spent scrubbing historic games, highlights and moments from Youtube, alienating a swath of young viewers until the Association got wise to the digital game. Beyond that and better to our point at hand, it goes to explain how in the span of decade, the median age of an MMA viewer could allegedly jump 15 years.

I've already mentioned that the UFC launched Fight Pass, which above and beyond its utility to American users, also brings its products to an international-albeit-region-blocked audience of 450,000-500,000 subscribers in total; this study cannot possibly account for that. Previously, I mentioned MMA's “Dark Ages,” an era generally accepted to encapsulate 1997 to 2001, from the John McCain-led ban of MMA in 36 states shortly before UFC 12 -- though the event drew well on PPV before the promotion's widespread relegation to DirecTV -- to UFC 33 in September 2001, when the newly-formed Zuffa led the company back onto mass-distributed PPV and brought the company's first, though disastrous, card to Las Vegas. But, this epoch in MMA history instilled a particular, role-specific resourcefulness in anyone who loved this sport, plus the rise of global, streaming technology during a period when the UFC vs. Pride Fighting Championships was still the dominant MMA narrative helped forge a generation of fan who knew how to get what they needed.

In high school, the one other MMA fan I knew happened to have a satellite box with a hacked keycard, which worked out brilliantly. However, the first fight card I remember pirating via my computer was, of all things, Pride 30, co-headlined by the best of the three “Cro Cop” Mirko Filipovic and Josh Barnett fights and the snake oil between Kazushi Sakuraba and Ken Shamrock; what a pity, I only missed Bushido 9 by a single event. Nonetheless, perhaps largely owning to the celebrity of judo star-turned-MMA fighter Yoon Dong Sik, Korean television channel XTM picked up Pride and somehow, some way, through a program I'm eternally thankful for, a peer-to-peer streaming service called AfreecaTV allowed me to watch it. Live. Pride. Live. No, old heads, not Pridecast, not play-by-play on your favorite forum from that one guy who happens to live in Japan. Live, on my screen. On our screens.

That experience alone entrenched me in a world of passionate fans that wanted to share the sport, however clandestine, because they loved it. For the nearly 12 years, I've never wondered how I will watch the next big sporting match; I know there's a way. More importantly, I'm anything but alone on this. Nevermind the ongoing success of the 18-34 demographic in the sport, MMA was a sport forced to the fringes, that needed to live and incubate on the internet to keep itself alive. On top of that, even before live event streaming was viable, MMA fans were lovers of a truly international and fractured sport, a sport with circumstances and effectively necessitated tape trading, ripping, downloading and torrenting as the life support necessary to remain a diehard. Yes, SBJ's number is determined by the fact that younger MMA fans -- kill me before I use “millennial” -- have never had cable or gave up on cable, plus old affluent dads who have a diverse sports package with FS1 skew the result. Still, mixed martial arts has long trained its fans, regardless of age, to get their fix by whatever means necessary, typically one involving an internet connection.

Look at the other sports in the SBJ study with erratic, out-of-whack rises in median viewership. Professional wrestling went from 33 to 54 years old from 2006 to 2016, while “action sports” -- you know, MotoCross and the like -- leaped from 33 to 47. Unlike MMA, we do have data for these subjects: from 2000-06, the median age of a wrasslin' viewer went from 28 to 33, an increase of five years; with action sports, it was 31 to 33, a whole two years. Are we really to believe that the devotees of MMA, pro wrestling and [expletive] dirtbiking aged 15-20 years in a decade? No, obviously not and I'm sure that you can see the similarities between all of them. Sure, they may all be “Mountain Dew sports” that are xxxtreme to the maxxxx, but they also have a host of other, similar features.

In the case of pro wrestling, in its kissing cousins relationship with MMA, they both share the cultural tendency toward collecting, sharing and in some cases, stealing. After all, many early MMA fans were getting their fix -- be it Pride, K-1, Shooto, Pancrase, Rings or otherwise -- from established pro wrestling tape traders or rippers. With action sports, you have, at least logically, a younger-trending audience who is going to know what FirstRowSports is and knows how to see a surfing competition halfway around the world, live.

Even more than that, all three of these sports -- again, don't mock the wrasslin' – are domains dominated by the highlight and the animated gif. This may hold true of boxing, but the longstanding fan culture of the “Sweet Science” is historically different; there may be a dedicated underbelly of pugilistic freaks who love their proxied streams, but your long-tenured boxing, fan on average, has nowhere near the experience or interest in scrapping for international footage and while there's still tons of boxing streamed on the internet, I'd still say the MMA-wrestling connection has long imbued both pursuits with a fundamental, almost DNA-level appetite for more content from different places and the trained resourcefulness to acquire it. Akin to the UFC Fight Pass launch, on the wrestling side you have WWE Network to New Japan World, designed to bring streaming events and extensive, exclusive libraries from stories promotions to fans and to offer them, as consumers, a comfort and amenity in their preference as an “online” person. The sports that have these historic relationships with bootlegging are precisely the entities that have emphasized the online sphere.

Even traditional stick-and-ball sports fall under this umbrella: by the SBJ study, the average age of an NHL television watcher went from 33 to 42 to 49 from 2000-16. What's far more likely is that the American hockey fans are a marginalized audience that feel like they don't get the full slate of the sport they crave. Perhaps they don't get to see the teams they want and unlike Canadians, they don't have entire cable platforms just dedicated to showing NHL games. Maybe they're hardcores that want to watch the the IIHF World Championships, or the Under-18 Ivan Hlinka Tournament. Regardless, it is an audience that has been forced to rely on cunning and wit to see what they want to see, to get what they need. It only makes sense that they would share in the statistically insane leaps of MMA, wrestling and action sports. In fact, as far as hockey goes, the NHL's American broadcast partner NBC is the first of the “Big Four” networks to start consistently delivering and strongly promoting online, streaming viewership numbers, especially for NHL broadcasts on the flagship and the NBC Sports Network, but also MLS broadcasts as well.

Any self-respecting MMA fan has stolen some fight content and will read between the lines, see these numbers for what they are. If anything, this study is just a negotiating hurdle that new UFC owners WME-IMG will need to overcome in the coming months. Over the last five years and change, the UFC's TV rights deal with Fox has netted the promotion about $115 million per year. After 2015 and 2016 campaigns propped up by multiple Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey bouts, Zuffa was able to sell the brand to WME-IMG while pitching that the company could fetch $450 million in its next round of TV rights negotiations. The UFC's TV deal is up at the end of next year and WME-IMG is aided by the fact that while the likes of ESPN are shedding massive amounts of investment, the NBA, NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball are all sewn up until 2020; there's not much else to bid on and the UFC should benefit as a direct result of a lack of product on the market, regardless of if its suitors are shedding budget. However, despite the UFC and sports like MMA being ahead of the technological curve -- or at least the fans -- networks are still going to hold the most traditional of metrics, the sort of thing captured in SBJ's study, against it. Really, that's as far as it goes.

Even if it's ammunition in corporate negotiations, we know better. Even in the WME-IMG era, the median UFC fan is not aging and dying at this rate.

At least not literally, anyway.