“India is a priority for us” – Exclusive interview with UFC's Marshall Zelaznik

Exclusive interview with Marshall Zelaznik

When Dana White expressed UFC’s interest in coming to India back in 2012, it brought a lot of hope to the MMA fans in India. UFC was supposed to come to India this year, but due to some unforeseen circumstances, they had to postpone the event. I caught up with the individual who looks after the Indian market, the CCO and International Managing Director of UFC, Marshall Zelaznik to get his thoughts about UFC coming to India, and discussed in detail regarding what UFC has planned for the fans, and when we can expect UFC to come to India. Below is an excerpt from the interview.

The MMA fans in India have asked me numerous times when UFC would step into the country, and it would be great if you could catch us up with what UFC has in store for the fans in India.

Marshall: Yes, for sure. We started out the year, in all honesty, with an eye towards trying to bring an event to India. We were looking at the latter half of the year, which is the last quarter of this year to bring an event to India. As it turns out, with our schedule and with the event that got cancelled as you know, it became harder for us to manage the original schedule. So unfortunately, while we couldn't bring an event to India, we are in a very serious and mature discussion with Sony to at least start activating with some ground events. There will be fights additionally, but we're going to plan for next year to deliver an event. We want to have the fighters out, and we want to have the fighters interact with our fans there (In India). The TV ratings on Sony Six have been climbing and climbing; there is a lot of excitement within the company. It's been obviously a pretty busy summer for us, so we're going to try and get our schedules aligned for next week, and Manjit Singh who is the chairman now is in Los Angeles now and I'm in Las Vegas. So we'll have discussions to get this activation going because the market feels right for it, for sure.

The last time we spoke in February, you had informed me that UFC was planning to come to India in mid – 2014. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Can you please tell us why?

Marshall: Well, I think it was a couple of things. One, it was, as we looked at our schedule at the end of the year, we had hoped to bring an event to India in the second or third or fourth quarter. As our schedule was evolving, and as you look at our schedule even now, with the event that was cancelled in August (UFC 176) and so we had to reshuffle our schedule all of a sudden, and during that rescheduling, what we started to realize was that in the last half of the year, the large majority of our events were going to be overseas, and so for us, it made us re-evaluate the right time to go to India. One of the events we had always planned to do even with our India planning was the Mexico event, but we want to make sure that we bring a very big event to India. And so, when we had to reshuffle cards and sort of move fights around, it became difficult to stick to our original schedule. Unfortunately, the Indian event was one of the events that got pushed, but it will get pushed into next year. But no one's lost any enthusiasm for the market; it's just one of those things. It's actually pretty rare in the way we manage our business, but our calendar is always organic, and it's always evolving. So it's just one of those things that happened, and it's sad because we actually had been to India, and we looked at the Indira Gandhi Arena. We had hired an on - ground promotion - I mean we had all the wheels rolling, and we had to pull back and say, "You know what? Let's get through this year and regroup for next year."

What are your thoughts on India as a potential destination for UFC? Can you please elaborate on what UFC has planned for India?

Marshall: Sure. I can tell you that as we look at the objective beta points, and you look at how our ratings are doing on Sony Six - We recently had an event which did 2 million viewers on an early Sunday morning (Live telecast) in India, and we've had events which peaked at 3 million viewers that we were told. Other things we were seeing was that the market was more ready for UFC than ever, and our traffic to Youtube, Facebook and ufc.com is continuing to grow. The last time I looked, we were up 300% in our Youtube connectivity and our traffic to ufc.com was growing. Those are some of the objective things, and then anecdotally from speaking with our partners in Sony Six, there is more and more interest from sponsors to get associated with UFC. It's very interesting to understand what is happening because we can see this young demographic that is engaging with us, and in light of all that, we had belief as we were planning for 2014, which was why we were looking to bring the event there.

But I think some of the events you can expect from us, I'm not sure they'll happen this year, but I hope they will, and the planning will allow it, is to get the fighters organized; what we want to do is we want to come in, get the fighters interacting with the fans, and that means going into gyms, putting on seminars, working with the media to interview these fighters, working with Sony Six to work on charitable causes and get the fighters to interact there, and really start activating on the ground and let the people interact with the UFC and the fighters. And then, obviously it will culminate with an event in India, and next year will be our plan. We're going into our planning meetings; one is in a couple of weeks now in September. We're having all of the outer offices, the heads in the offices come in and we're going to sit down and we're going to start working on our schedules and see what makes sense. We might look at the second half of next year and once we work our schedule, we can get it locked in. We already had 30% of the work done, so we feel like it's now just a matter of pushing the button and go ahead with the event.

Can we see any of the UFC fighters starring in the upcoming Bollywood movie ‘Warrior’, or any such projects coming up?

Marshall: I believe that it’s definitely possible. There’s definite interest; I know that the film group that’s putting together ‘Warrior’ actually reached out to us, and we’re setting up conversations now to find out whether there’s something we can do to work together. It’s always tricky in the movie space as to how things work out. But there’s a lot of enthusiasm internally, even the Sony group is. So we’re going to evaluate it, and I expect that by the first week of September, we’ll get a sense of what our role would be for fighters and for the UFC in that project.

Did you have the opportunity to look at some of the local fighters in India? And if so, was there anyone who stood apart, and has a chance of getting into the UFC in the near future?

Marshall: When I was there, I didn’t, but you may remember about 3 – 6 months earlier than that, our match maker Sean Shelby, who is also sort of our talent scout had come to the country and identified some fighters. While I didn’t get a chance to do it, Sean has his list that he continues to monitor. There are a lot of fighters out there who have the ability to compete professionally in the sport, so it’ll be interesting to watch how they evolve in their careers and also when we bring our event there, and as we develop our development program, we’ll get the fighters more exposure and training.

Sean has 4 names (of fighters) that he has been very closely monitoring from India.

I’ve been told by the Indian fans that they feel UFC isn’t really focusing on India, and being ardent MMA fans, they were disappointed that the organization hasn’t entered India yet. With the amount of coverage UFC gets before every PPV, is there a chance for the Indian fans to hear from their favorite fighters before the PPVs exclusively?

Marshall: If you’re saying like an interaction through social media outlet – It’s not a bad idea. It’s not on our current list of planning; if we can find a way to facilitate, maybe from your group to facilitate the fans with a fighter – whether through a chat or Q n’ A, I just made a note, and I’m going to track back with Sony and talk to our PR group internally, and also our fighter relations group, and I have no doubt that we can organize something like that, and we could do that pretty effectively as a way to interact with our fans there.

Do you have any message for the fight fans in India?

Marshall: I think that the message is that the UFC is coming, that we’re committed to the market, and we appreciate everybody’s interest and loyalty to the brand. We won’t let the fans down, we’re going to bring fighters to India, we’re going to bring fights to India, and the sport’s just begun there.

We also talked about a lot of other interesting things, such as the introduction of strawweight division in the UFC, about India being the next Brazil for MMA and more. Listen to the complete audio here, and make sure to follow UFC on Twitter and on Facebook to get the latest updates.