The news that the UFC 147 fight card will now feature a main event pitting Wanderlei "The Axe Murderer" Silva against Rich "Ace" Franklin has not exactly been greeted enthusiastically in all corners.
Wednesday's announcement that Franklin will replace the injured Vitor Belfort on June 23 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil was met with a mix of apathy and annoyance from fans and pundits, coupled with observations in some quarters that the UFC would or should change the card from a pay-per-view broadcast to a free televised broadcast.
That's not a likely outcome - it may not even be possible from a business perspective - but the truth is that when the UFC moved the UFC 147 fight card from a large soccer stadium Rio De Janeiro to Belo Horizonte and the smaller Estadio Jornalista Felipe Drumond, it ceased to be a card built for the UFC's North American fan base.
The fight card - which also features the finals of the UFC's all-Brazilian season of The Ultimate Fighter - is clearly geared towards the Brazilian audience, which the UFC has targeted as a major growth area in the years ahead. In its two recent Brazilian cards - UFC 134 last August and UFC 142 in January - the promotion did feature North American and international stars (not to mention title bouts), but with Brazilian fighters making up 60 percent of the two cards, it's clear that the UFC has Brazil largely in mind when the fight card is assembled.
This is particularly the case with UFC 147. Of the four fights that are announced, six of the participating fighters are Brazilian, not counting the middleweight and featherweight TUF Brazil finals. With more TUF Brazil participants expected to fill up the preliminary card, the effect is heightened. As for the top fights on the card, they should still produce compelling action, which at a certain level, is the entire point of assembling a UFC fight card.
Part of the UFC's strength is the way the promotion develops fighters up and down the fight card, often giving fans the chance to watch an entire 11- or 12-fight event through a combination of pay-per-view, free TV and online streaming through Facebook. The result is that there is a seemingly never-ending supply of talented fighters who are well-known to fans and, depending on scheduling and injuries, can be plugged into an upcoming fight card in the event of an emergency. Even when a fight has to be scrapped altogether, the UFC generally has a co-main event already scheduled featuring name fighters who are capable of headlining a fight card.
It happened last fall at UFC 143, when a planned UFC Welterweight Championship bout between champion Georges St-Pierre and Carlos Condit was postponed due to an injury to the champ. The UFC was left with a main event pitting B.J. Penn - one of only two men to hold UFC titles in two different weight classes - against Nick Diaz, the former Strikeforce Welterweight Champion who relinquished that title in order to come to the UFC. Admittedly, it worked significantly less well when a UFC 130 fight card that originally featured the UFC Lightweight Championship rematch between Frankie Edgar and Gray Maynard wound up pitting Quinton "Rampage" Jackson against Matt Hamill, but "Rampage" is a former World Champion who's made a name for himself in both the UFC and Pride and is certainly a main-event fighter.
In truth, the situation the UFC faces with UFC 147 - which was originally scheduled to feature a UFC Middleweight Championship bout between Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen - is closer to Rampage-Hamill than it is to Penn-Diaz. While Silva and Belfort are both former world champions, they're also out of the title picture, with Silva liekly on the verge of retirement with his next loss. The bout between "The Axe Murderer" and "The Phenom" had a certain appeal as a battle of legends, but like the matchup between Randy Couture and Mark Coleman at UFC 109, it probably won't be a big seller on pay-per-view.
Based on the UFC's track record since returning to Brazil, though, management is probably OK with that.