Saturday night’s UFC On ESPN 9 event at the APEX facility in Las Vegas drew an average of 1,021,000 viewers on the main ESPN channel.
That makes it the fifth most watched event in the ‘UFC On ESPN’ series to date, though it was lower than the UFC On ESPN 8 event, headlined by Alistair Overeem and Walt Harris, which took place on May 16th and drew 1,198,000 viewers.
On this occasion it was a welterweight fight between former champion Tyron Woodley and Gilbert Burns which headlined the show, but on this night many people’s attention on cable was instead being drawn to news channels such as CNN George Floyd protests and rioting swept through the nation.
The prelims for UFC On ESPN 9 were headlined by a women’s flyweight fight between Kaitlyn Chookagian and Antonina Shevchenko and drew an average of 615,000 viewers, making it the fourth most watched preliminary card in the series.
Overall the numbers suggest that while the UFC’s usual fanbase has generally returned to watching the events they are putting on, there hasn’t been the significant surge in viewers that perhaps had been anticipated due to people having been starved of sporting events due to the coronavirus lockdown over the past few months.
