The UFC makes a big deal of being an international promotion, but when push comes to shove they still value their U.S. market over all else.
Case in point: every pay-per-view event starts at 10 p.m. ET, and championship belts are almost exclusively defended on pay-per-views. That leads to insane situations like the main event of UFC 304 in Manchester taking place at 5 a.m. local time.
You’d hope the UFC would take the feedback they got from fighters and fans after that decision and never do something like that again. But according to Ilia Topuria, he was told that any event in Spain would be held under the same brutal conditions.
“So to be honest, the conversations that I have with them, I don’t know if I wanna do it in Spain, in the stadium,” Topuria said during a recent media day. “Because if they make that happen, I have to fight at four in the morning local time. I don’t wanna do that, to be honest. I’m a professional athlete. I wanna fight in good conditions, you know what I mean?”
“So if something changed and they [are] gonna do it in prime time, in the local time? Of course yes, it will be huge. If not, I prefer to fight always in the United States.”
That’s gotta be one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard in the many years I’ve been covering the sport. Ilia Topuria has the potential to be the biggest European sports star in UFC history. He’s already been embraced by the country’s biggest soccer club, who have pushed him forward to their fanbase as a fighter to support. All he needs now is a big homecoming fight — say at the 85,000 seat Santiago Bernabeu Stadium — to blow things up.
Holding that event at 4 a.m. local time would be promotional malpractice. If there’s some limitation to the way the UFC’s media rights are set up in their current ESPN deal, we need to pray it gets fixed for 2026. The UFC needs to be able to decouple itself from North American timezones once in a while, as this Topuria situation makes clear.
