5 UFC rules you might not have heard of

#2 You can’t use abusive language

Nick Diaz was warned for talking trash in his 2004 fight with Robbie Lawler

Even as far back as the early days of the UFC – in the mid-1990’s – fighters quickly realised that trash talk was an important part of the game. In today’s climate in particular, the more fans that are watching a UFC show, the more money is made for both the promoter and the fighter – and most of the time, the best way to entice the fans in is to build some kind of grudge or bad blood through a bit of trash talking.

Interestingly though, most of the time the bad blood is finished by the time the fighters actually step into the Octagon. Usually, behind the trash talk, there’s plenty of mutual respect between combatants, and it’s rare to see the pre-fight trash talk continue into the cage. Surprisingly though, that could well be down to the fact that according to the UFC rules, using abusive language during a fight is actually illegal.

This rule isn’t the most commonly enforced one, however; fighters have gotten away with talking trash inside the cage plenty of times, with the likes of Jason Knight and the Diaz brothers continually taunting their opponents, both verbally and with hand signals, during their fights.

Perhaps the only notable example of a referee attempting to admonish a fighter for this, in fact, came at UFC 47 back in 2004, when much-maligned referee Steve Mazzagatti warned Nick Diaz for continually hurling verbal abuse at Robbie Lawler. It was a rare example of this rule being enforced – but it didn’t help Lawler, who was knocked out in the second round.