New pay-per-view estimates have arrived for the UFC’s last two major events, January’s UFC 220 event in Chicago and UFC 221 from Perth, Australia.
First up, January’s UFC 220: Miocic Vs Ngannou event is estimated to have drawn in the region of 320,000 – 340,000 pay-per-view buys according to MMAfighting’s Dave Meltzer.
That’s not too bad, though perhaps the promotion would have hoped for more given that there was a lot of hype surrounding heavyweight title challenger Francis Ngannou ahead of his fight with Stipe Miocic, while there was also a second belt on the line in the co-main event when Daniel Cormier faced off against Volkan Oezdemir.
Admittedly the rest of the card was underwhelming, but even so it’s interesting to note that UFC 219 is believed to have delivered similar PPV numbers despite only having one title fight, which continues to feed the narrative that women’s featherweight champion Cris ‘Cyborg’ Justino is something of a draw in her own right.
By way of contrast, the recent UFC 221 event fell well short of the figures that those two previous events garnered with only 130,000 estimated to have tuned in for that event down under.
This was another event that was sorely lacking when it came to strength-in-depth, with the main event between Luke Rockhold and Yoel Romero being the only real standout, while Mark Hunt fighting Curtis Blaydes in the co-main event didn’t appear to get many people’s pulse racing.
Next up is UFC 222 in early March with ‘Cyborg’ back on headlining duties, so it’ll be interesting to see how she fares on the PPV sales from against a less well known fighter in Invicta FC’s Yana Kunitskaya.
