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Ultimate Fighting Championship has an upstart Asian challenger

Bloomberg Published on Thu, Aug 31, 2017 / 11:34 AM GMT+8

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(Aug 31): Chatri Sityodtong was nine years old when his father took him to Bangkok’s Lumpinee Stadium for a Thai-boxing fight. The fascination for rapid, hard-hitting martial arts never left him.

The Muay Thai-mad boy grew into Asia’s foremost promoter of mixed martial arts. His One Championship is becoming Asia’s biggest competitor to Ultimate Fighting Championship, the combat mashup that has built a global fan base. When UFC champion Conor McGregor was defeated on Aug 26 by Floyd Mayweather in a high-profile Las Vegas boxing match, the bout reached 1 billion homes with an estimated pay-per-view take of US$700 million ($951 million).

The success of UFC has made investors pay attention to a global sport that was once dismissed by U.S. Senator John McCain in the 1990s as “human cockfighting.” Last year, brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta sold the company that controls UFC to WME-IMG for an eye-popping US$4 billion. They bought UFC in 2001 for US$2 million.