If it was truly a meriocratic system regardless of nationality where the UFC was searching for all the best guys they could get the number of Russian/Former USSR fighters would be much, much higher and American much much lower. China might have.. 3 on the roster.
This will be long, I often write a lot because it helps me organize research and organize my thoughts, so the TLDR is: The number of russians would be higher, the number of americans would not necessarily be much lower.
The americans in the promotion would be different, but not necessarily less, maybe 7-12 percentage points or so. In my opinion wrestling is the predominant base in MMA. There are some exceptions and there can be some outflows but as a general rule. But the proportion of MMA fighters at the top would vaguely resemble the annual national standings in wrestling. And as you can see in this year's Olympics, particularly men's freestyle, in almost every even Russia and the US medal, and then a spattering of representation from each CIS nation, the west-asian/east-european nations that formerly constituted the soviet bloc. Some as well from the middle east. The countries that would actually fall behind are the countries without significant wrestling bases, so west europe, east asia, south/central america, so on and so forth.
And I think that's where we're trending anyways, so it is what it is. I think, interestingly enough as we're talking about a thread where Khabib complains about not enough Russians being let in, it was worse before he came along. He was the one who really changed the perception amongst UFC brass that a russian wrestler could sell PPVs and be exciting and become a household name. In the past few years we've seen in a influx of CIS fighters debuting in the UFC and they look pretty darn unstoppable. And as they've been moving up, some of their displacement has been American fighters but a lot of their displacement has not been American fighters.
For example, when Makhachev and Tsarukyan arrived in the UFC one of the first guys they both beat was Davi Ramos, former ADCC champ. He was cut after losing to Tsarukyan. Another guy Tsarukyan beat who also left the org right after losing to him was Olivier Aubin Mercier, a Canadian judoka. It was losing to Makhachev and then Rustam Khabilov that got Kajan Johnson, who came into the promotion as a TUF: Canada prospect and started 4-1. Now this combo also took out Chris Wade (and eventually helped retire two vets, Brazilian Tibau and American Lentz), but as you can see the collateral damage of the rise of Islam Makhachev and Arman Tsarukyan is mostly not American. Islam is scheduled to fight RDA to move Islam up the rankings. RDA's recent losses have mostly come at the hands of a number of American wrestlers, like Usman, Covington, Chiesa, and long before that he lost to Khabib and Clay Guida. If he loses to Islam his stock will fall, obviously. The second Brazilian in the rankings is Carlos Diego Ferreira. He's lost 2 straight to Beneil Dariush and then Gregor Gillespie, if he loses to Grant Dawson, the American wrestler he's scheduled to fight, that will either move him or Thiago Moises out of the rankings and would move Dawson into the rankings.
Obviously this is just one division but I think it's a microcosm of things to come. Another division to consider for example. If Khamzat beats Li then Khamzat moves into the rankings, maybe at the expense of Li. Sean Brady beat Jake Matthews (Auzzie) to move himself into the rankings. Right now if anyone moves up it would move Salikhov out, so we will see how that plays out but you can also take note that Salkhov got himself into the rankings by beating 4 internationals in a row. The threat looming over this division in my opinion is Shavkat Rakhmonov, who has beaten 2 brazilians, Alex Oliveira and Michel Prazeres. He needs one more fight to get a ranked fight, at that point he'd probably fight one of Ponzinibbio, Li, or Salikhov. If he fights Salikhov that's just replacing CIS with CIS. If Li was still ranked at the time he might fight Li. If Ponzinibbio, he might take Ponzinibbio's spot in the rankings. The fighters sitting closest to a rank spot (probably 1 fight for each) are Ramazan Emeev (Russian) and Daniel Rodriguez (American). I'm not a massive fan of either, but whoever moves out, certainly the person coming in will be American or CIS.
And Bantamweight, Featherweight, heavily loaded up with CIS fighters who are on the edge of contention, like one fight away or two fights away. As well as Americans on win streaks. So it poses itself as a theoretical problem but I think soon this will be an actual problem for Dana White. He has to do his best to match up as many CIS fighters against other CIS fighters and/or Americans and against other Americans. He's built for himself a very diverse UFC, but recently he's been letting in a lot of CIS prospects, and these fighters are going to slowly erode the populations of most other countries. Now, I had a long post about it above, the US proportion of the UFC has already been going down due to the UFC's active efforts to diminish it. The UFC has been actively signing more international fighters and recruiting more through say contender series, I gave some numbers on that. So the number may still be inflated, but the level of inflation would be rather minimal compared to the various other regions that consistently produce no talent but still get a lot of UFC slots, especially as the org is majority international.
