The UFC’s ambitious plans for their one-of-a-kind ‘Riyadh Season: Noche FC’ event at The Sphere in Las Vegas on September 14th have now been revealed.
We’ve known since it was first announced that the event was set to celebrate Mexican Independence Day, but until now it wasn’t clear how they intended to tie that in with the fact that they are hosting the event at ‘The Sphere’, with it’s unique 160,000 square-foot curved LED screen.
“At the highest level, we were trying to think about, how do we put on a live MMA fight — 10 fights throughout the night — and not take away from the fight action, not take too much time in between fights where we slow things down, but also tell this other story about the Mexican people and their heritage and their culture, because it’s rich and it’s deep,” the UFC’s Chief Content Officer Craig Bosari told The Hollywood Reporter.
To achieve that the plan is to have a film overseen by Academy Award nominated producer / director Carlos Lopez Estrada that will celebrate Mexico’s contribution to combat sports, broken down into 90 second chapters that will play in-between fights on the card.
“Those would be our main drivers for storytelling, everything that Dana wanted to get across … those films then transition into what we’re calling these worlds, which is like these environments that take up the entire LED screen, that then the fights sit within,” Borsari revealed. “So there’s what we call a film and a world and an act. So there’s these acts that take you through the entire night, and we tell the story within those acts.”
It’s clearly a hugely ambitious project, but it’s proven to be an exceptionally expensive one too.
A typical UFC pay-per-view event costs around $2 million to produce, but Noche FC was budgeted to be an $8 million show. However, that figure has since gone through the roof, and is now reported to have cost over $20 million.
Nevertheless, Dana White is insistent that money was not an issue for an event that he believes will set a new standard for both sports and entertainment in a live setting.
“I said, ‘I’m doing this.’ I didn’t give a shit what the budget was, I’m doing this,” White told The Hollywood Reporter. “I truly believe that this is going to be a game changer, where sports and entertainment truly come together for the first time ever. And I think a lot of other people are going to see this, and I think they’re going to start to changing the way they build these arenas.”
Whether it proves to be a success that others will be eager to replicate remains to be seen though as sales for the expensive tickets have been sluggish, with 1,000 reportedly still available with just over a week to go until fight night.
As such ticket prices are now reportedly falling, and White’s own estimate for the live gate has dropped from $25-27 million down to $21 million.
It doesn’t help that they face stiff competition from Mexican boxing hero Canelo Alvarez, who has a fight at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas on the same night.
Meanwhile, event star Sean O’Malley, who will attempt to defend his bantamweight title against Merab Dvlashvili, has also expressed his frustration that there’s been more focus on the unique nature of the event rather than his fight.
It’s certainly going to be a unique occasion for those who do attend however, and it’ll be interesting to see if it also captures the imagination of those considering buying it on pay-per-view.
