Is/was MMA ever bigger than boxing?

When comparing both at their peak, boxing has been bigger than MMA will ever be.

We live in softer times these days and the mass public is on average less likely to watch fights for sport imo
 
Boxing still has their big names which make for big events, but the UFC brand has a huge following. Put on cards every week, so it's become a mainstream company, revenue stream every weekend. Big gap to BT or the rest, they don't matter in this comparison.

Current UFC has maybe 5 really big cards a year. Boxing is similar in that, the big events rely on a couple of draws, but they don't have the constant stream.

Conor is a bigger star worldwide than Canelo or Joshua, but after Conor the UFC doesn't have big stars like before in Tito, Chuck, GSP, Penn, Rampage, Rashad, Ronda and now Khabib and Jones are out. Adesanya is currently about a 500k draw, with the loss to Jan, but he can bounce back within the next 3 fights and continue drawing more.
 
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It's already bigger. Go to instagram and search for popular UFC fighters then search at the popular boxers. Boxing has only 2 or 3 with more than a million followers, UFC has many more.

Go to youtube and search for UFC official channel and then search for Top Rank, Matchroom boxing, PBC or golden boy. UFC has nearly 12 million subscribers, none of the big boxing promotions have even 1 million. Even Bellator and ONE have more than them.

Yes, boxing is more relevant in a lot of countries. It's much older. But you need to understand that is not a big sport in most of them. I'm from Argentina, we are always in the top 10 in boxing. And yes it is bigger here, but the "following" here it's something like: 95% football, 4.4% other sports, 0,5% boxing and 0,1% MMA. So the difference between the 2 is not that big to be relevant. I'm sure is the same in most countries and that's why the numbers in social media are bigger for UFC fighters.
 
MMA surpased boxing with the casuals a long time ago. Casuals maybe know 5 active boxers these days.
 
It's already bigger. Go to instagram and search for popular UFC fighters then search at the popular boxers. Boxing has only 2 or 3 with more than a million followers, UFC has many more.

Go to youtube and search for UFC official channel and then search for Top Rank, Matchroom boxing, PBC or golden boy. UFC has nearly 12 million subscribers, none of the big boxing promotions have even 1 million. Even Bellator and ONE have more than them.

Yes, boxing is more relevant in a lot of countries. It's much older. But you need to understand that is not a big sport in most of them. I'm from Argentina, we are always in the top 10 in boxing. And yes it is bigger here, but the "following" here it's something like: 95% football, 4.4% other sports, 0,5% boxing and 0,1% MMA. So the difference between the 2 is not that big to be relevant. I'm sure is the same in most countries and that's why the numbers in social media are bigger for UFC fighters.


The first part is beyond false. Just from the top of my head, pac, canelo, ryan garcia,.loma, tank davis, wilder, AJ, Fury .. all have more than a million followers. As for the promoters likes and subscribers, boxing has a very different model than the UFC. The UFC brand is bigger than the sport, while in boxing, nobody cares or really support a particular promoter.
 
I'm not that into boxing. Never have been. So, I hope in saying this I have my bias in check...but MMA has been bigger than boxing since the late 90's, as far as I know. Sure, specific boxing match-ups sell better than most(if not all) UFC cards...but overall, MMA is waaaay bigger a sport.
 
Country by country it seems to me (going by instinct):

Boxing is bigger: Mexico, UK, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela, Philippines

MMA is bigger: Brazil, Australia, NZ, Poland, Sweden, Netherlands

Not sure/close: USA, Canada, Russia, Japan, South Korea

Thoughts?
I can only answer on the UK but you're bang on with that one. MMA is very niche compared to boxing here. Still a strong following but not in the same league as boxing yet.
 
MMA is bigger than boxing. This is just the UFC compared to boxing. It doesn’t factor in other orgs, which would swing it further to MMA’s side.
 

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The first part is beyond false. Just from the top of my head, pac, canelo, ryan garcia,.loma, tank davis, wilder, AJ, Fury .. all have more than a million followers. As for the promoters likes and subscribers, boxing has a very different model than the UFC. The UFC brand is bigger than the sport, while in boxing, nobody cares or really support a particular promoter.
I'm not going to bother listing the biggest names in each sport and comparing them. It's so obvious who has more followers and so easy to check just by going to their profiles. I don't care to do it. We both know who has more followers.

And sure, boxing doesn't have the equivalent of the UFC. But the fact that both Bellator and ONE have more subscribers than any boxing promotion says a lot about the disparity between both sports.
 
I'm not going to bother listing the biggest names in each sport and comparing them. It's so obvious who has more followers and so easy to check just by going to their profiles. I don't care to do it. We both know who has more followers.

And sure, boxing doesn't have the equivalent of the UFC. But the fact that both Bellator and ONE have more subscribers than any boxing promotion says a lot about the disparity between both sports.
There’s no allegiance to promoters bough, boxers often change it up
 
I'm not going to bother listing the biggest names in each sport and comparing them. It's so obvious who has more followers and so easy to check just by going to their profiles. I don't care to do it. We both know who has more followers.

And sure, boxing doesn't have the equivalent of the UFC. But the fact that both Bellator and ONE have more subscribers than any boxing promotion says a lot about the disparity between both sports.


Im far from conviced this would be the case, and since.your first claim was such obviously false, i think you need to dig deeper into this before making such statement. And again, promotions in MMA are much more important than in boxing. MMA fighters usually fights only fighters from the same promotions, and they fight for the promotion title, which, as you probably know, is not the case in boxing. Im a fan of both sports, and i know the promoter of every mma fighters i know of, while i only know the promoters of only a handful of boxer. Not too mention that boxing fans tends to be older than mma fans.and therefore less active on social media.

Now, im not saying that boxing is more popular than MMA. I tend to think that at the moment they are fairly equal
 
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There’s no allegiance to promoters bough, boxers often change it up
Even if you put all the youtube channels of the boxing promotions together they will still not match the number of followers in the UFC. You shouldn't because, most of those fans are repeteaded subscribers to all of them but even with that is not enough.

Just go to youtube and look for yourself the numbers of views of each video. Look at the number of views the press conference between Fury and Wilder did, posted last week. That is one of the biggest fights in the sport. Just 76.000 views. On the other hand the pre fight press conference for UFC last event last week did 1.6 million views.

The numbers don't lie, man. Same thing if you go looking at profiles of UFC stars and boxing stars in instagram and twittter. Numbers don't lie.
 
I'm not that into boxing. Never have been. So, I hope in saying this I have my bias in check...but MMA has been bigger than boxing since the late 90's, as far as I know. Sure, specific boxing match-ups sell better than most(if not all) UFC cards...but overall, MMA is waaaay bigger a sport.


Canada is a large country, so ill only talk for Quebec, but over here, boxing is much more popular since there's a few quebec.boxers that are among the elites, while there's no mma fighters that i would.consider world class (bar maybe OAM but he's a total nobody over here)
 
Im far from conviced this would be the case, and since.your first claim was such obviously false, i think you need to dig deeper into this before making such statement. And again, promotions in MMA are much more important than in boxing. MMA fighters usually fights only fighters from the same promotions, and they fight for the promotion title, which, as you probably know, is not the case in boxing. Im a fan of both sports, and i know the promoter of every mma fighters i know, while i only know the promoters of a handful of boxer. Not too mention that boxing fans tends to be older than mma fans.and therefore less active on social media.

Now, im not saying that boxing is more popular than MMA. I tend to think that at the moment they are fairly equal
I don't need to do that. I don't need to take a picture of the sky just because you say it's not blue. Instagram and Twitter profiles are there for you to see. The numbers don't lie.

And it doesn't matter if boxing is divided while MMA is centered around the UFC. Even the biggest fights in boxing which should unite boxing fans are not making the same number of views on youtube than MMA fights. Look at the number of views the press conference between Fury and Wilder did, posted last week. That is one of the biggest fights in the sport. Just 76.000 views. On the other hand the pre fight press conference for UFC last event last week did 1.6 million views. Numbers don't lie.

You hide behind "boxing fans are old" like boxing fans always do to justify the lack of support in social media. It makes no sense, even old people knows how to use technology these days
 
Just checked and i must stand corrected. The average age of mma and boxing fans is now the same (at least in the US). I must say that im very surprised by this and "concerned" by this
 
I don't need to do that. I don't need to take a picture of the sky just because you say it's not blue. Instagram and Twitter profiles are there for you to see. The numbers don't lie.

And it doesn't matter if boxing is divided while MMA is centered around the UFC. Even the biggest fights in boxing which should unite boxing fans are not making the same number of views on youtube than MMA fights. Look at the number of views the press conference between Fury and Wilder did, posted last week. That is one of the biggest fights in the sport. Just 76.000 views. On the other hand the pre fight press conference for UFC last event last week did 1.6 million views. Numbers don't lie.

You hide behind "boxing fans are old" like boxing fans always do to justify the lack of support in social media. It makes no sense, even old people knows how to use technology these days


Again, you are obviously not aware yourself of the number of followers boxers have since you made a statement that was proven to be blatantly false. So I won't take your word on this as gospel (no offense intended)

And yes old people know how to use social media, but they dont use it as frequently as younger people do, and care less about the personnal life of fighters (hence they tend to not follow fighters as much).

Anyhow, as i said before, it seems that the average age of mma and boxing fan are the same, so my "hypothesis" was incorrect
 
Pretty sure UFC's PPVs sell better on average than boxing ones. Besides Canelo, who's selling close to 1 million ppvs in the US? Wilder/Fury II sold well and Joshua does well in England, but nobody is even touching 500k regularly besides Canelo and/or Fury/Joshua.
Bro it took 2 title fights and a bare Diaz fight for the last UFC to touch 600K PPV buys.

Diaz is literally a top 5 UFC ppv seller.

If you could get Wilder vs Fury 3, and a Canelo fight on the same card it would break 2 mil easy.
 
Never was, Never will be despite Mcg being popular and giving enough relevancy.

Boxing is coming along nicely and there's some nice matchups like Pac vs Spence and Fury vs Wilder and Usyk vs AJ, MMA is still very niche and in some countries isn't even known or has the same popularity as boxing. i am saying ths as someone who lives in a non mma country, boxing is more known.

Most people probably don't know who Tyson Fury is but most will know who Mike Tyson is. Boxing is far less mainstream than it used to be. I'd say both sports are kinda fringe at this point.
 
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