March 12, 2011, will go down as the day mixed martial arts changed forever.
Zuffa, UFC's parent company, has bought out its last true direct rival, Strikeforce. Driving a rival company into bankruptcy is one thing, but Zuffa and UFC have made quite the habit of completely buying out their rivals, seizing their assets and controlling their futures.
Just like the takeovers of PRIDE FC and WEC, Dana White has confirmed, UFC and Strikeforce will operate as two separate entities with their own management. But one must wonder how long the two companies will be kept separate. Looking back at Zuffa mergers, it's not only possible, it's inevitable.
Unlike Strikeforce, PRIDE was an established organization with a prestigious history and a loyal international fan base. Alleged deals between the Japanese Yakuza crime syndicates and PRIDE caused the organization to lose almost all its financial backings. In the world of mixed martial arts, March 2007 was a lot like March 2011, as the impossible had happened: Zuffa and the UFC announced the purchase of PRIDE Fighting Championships.
The original plan was for PRIDE to be the representative of Zuffa in Japan and for UFC to be the Zuffa representative of America. Every January, the best fighters from UFC and PRIDE would fight each other in a "Super Bowl-type event" where dream matches would become a reality. That plan didn't stick for long as White folded PRIDE before even putting on an event under the Zuffa banner. White said it would be near impossible to rebuild the company in Japan after the involvement of the Yakuza and simply sent the fighters from PRIDE to the UFC.
The situation with WEC was completely different. The idea was to keep WEC around as the sister company of UFC, where smaller-weight divisions would have an opportunity to show they are just as exciting, if not more so, than the heavyweights of UFC. The blueprint was set, and it was executed perfectly. After WEC produced such stars as Urijah Faber and Jose Aldo, it was announced UFC would absorb WEC in a merger. The whole process was to make UFC stronger in the long run, because White's aim is to put on as many fights as possible.
Even though White said Strikeforce will stick around, the script is always being rewritten. It made a lot of sense for Zuffa to want PRIDE and WEC to survive after their buyouts; they had gimmicks the UFC didn't. PRIDE had the ring, stomps and head kicks, and WEC had the lighter-weight classes. In a business sense, running two different organizations pulling in two different demographics is more financially beneficial than simply merging them immediately.
Strikeforce, on the other hand, wasn't a different or unique product. Aside from the talented fighters, Strikeforce was a second-rate, less-established UFC. Whoever watched Strikeforce watched UFC. Whether Zuffa keeps Strikeforce around for four more years or folds the operations before the first Zuffa-backed Strikeforce card, a merger between UFC and Strikeforce is inevitable.
