WME has been running the UFC like clowns for quite a while now.
They are a fucking Hollywood talent agency who value fighters primarily by their social media footprint. You can take shit like that into account when marketing people, but at the end of the day you still have to at least pretend to treat MMA like an actual sport where wins and losses matter. If you're giving people title shots who are on a losing streak and also haven't fought in years, if you paper your cards with Interim Titles that you take away a few weeks later because it's more convenient, if you sign fighters to title fights only to cancel them when a better one drops into your lap, you lose credibility with your hardcore fans (the ones that in-fact matter most). You lose credibility with your employees. More than that, you make all title fights mean less, and tarnish the aura that comes with being a UFC Champion, and that damages the UFC brand's drawing power across the board. On top of this you damage your already fragile credibility with the mainstream sports media, and that makes it harder to draw in new potential hardcore fans (I don't mean curiosity seekers, I mean die hard nerds like us who've followed this sport for years through thick and thin).
And if you pay most of your employees peanuts and take money out of their hands that was costing you nothing because you ban sponsors, and otherwise treat them poorly, you make people looking to make a career out of MMA think twice. You thin out the future talent pool. And you also lose existing world class fighters to other organizations.
This complete inability to see the long-term picture, or even the medium-term, it makes it a lot harder to be a fan of the UFC. I just wonder how they'll shoot themselves in the foot next.
