5 pivotal moments that lead to the dominance of the UFC

#4 Affliction taps out

While Elite XC had been unable to prise any top fighters away from the UFC, the same could not be said for clothing company Affliction in 2008.

Not only were they able to sign two of the UFC’s top Heavyweights, former champions Andrei Arlovski and Tim Sylvia, but they also brokered a deal with Zuffa’s great white whale – former PRIDE champion Fedor Emelianenko, the consensus top Heavyweight in the world.

How was this possible? The power of the almighty dollar.

Basically, Affliction were paying purses that were almost unheard of at the time.

Fedor – although most of his wage was undisclosed – was supposedly making millions of dollars per fight. Arlovski’s disclosed pay (on their second card) was $1m. Sylvia was making $800k per fight and even non-draws like Matt Lindland and Ben Rothwell were being paid huge, six-figure sums.

For the fighters, it sounded too good to be true.

As soon as rumours of Affliction branching into promotion leaked out, the UFC struck back, banning any mention of the company on their broadcasts. The once-popular t-shirts were suddenly nowhere to be seen at UFC events.

It didn’t stop the “t-shirt guys”, as Dana White would call them.

They scheduled their first event in July 2008, booked a Fedor vs. Sylvia headliner, and even went as far as subtitling it ‘Banned’. Rumours were flying around that they were on the verge of signing star fighters like Georges St-Pierre and Sean Sherk.

The UFC struck back again by scheduling a free-TV card featuring Anderson Silva on the same night as the inaugural Affliction PPV, but Affliction’s show still drew relatively well for a non-UFC MMA event – 100k buys – and it seemed like Zuffa had a real competitor on their hands.

What sunk Affliction in the end, though, was the same thing that allowed them to rise in the first place – those massive salaries.

While a 100k buy rate sounded nice, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to sustain Affliction’s monstrous wage bill and after their second event – main-evented by Fedor vs. Arlovski – didn’t do as well on PPV, it became clear that the promotion was in trouble.

A third event was scheduled for August 2009 and was set to feature a main event of Fedor vs. Josh Barnett. The event was subtitled ‘Trilogy’, which immediately raised questions for the promotion. Was this the final Affliction event?

It turned out that in fact, we’d already had the final one.

When the California State Athletic Commission announced that Barnett had failed a drug test and would not be licensed for the event, after a day or two of scrambling for a replacement, the bombshell was dropped.

Affliction would cease operations immediately and would return to the Zuffa fold as an official sponsor. In turn, the UFC would absorb chosen Affliction contracts, bringing the majority of the big names back onto their own roster.

People like to blame Barnett for the end of Affliction but the reality was that the promotion couldn’t sustain itself anyway. From all sources, the deal with the UFC was being brokered prior to the drug test and would’ve gone ahead after the third show regardless.

The lesson learned was that despite accusations of underpaying their fighters, the UFC’s pay structure was actually the only solvent one in the MMA world. The crash of Affliction showed that you couldn’t just throw big money at fighters and make a successful promotion.

While we see some UFC fighters ending their contracts and going into free agency today, the reality is that since Affliction closed shop, no promotion truly has the ability to outbid the UFC for any fighter – unless the UFC allows it.

By the dawn of 2010, the UFC’s dominance of the MMA world was practically complete.