UFC 217’s main event between Michael Bisping and the long-dormant Georges St-Pierre is another addition to the “superfight” column, at least amongst long-time fans of MMA. But with just six weeks to go until the two UFC legends fight for the middleweight title, a secretive survey allegedly states that most MMA fans these days just don’t know who GSP is. Damn millennials, now they’ve ruined GSP and diamonds.
This doesn’t bode well for the UFC, who wants at least one more big PPV win now that Jon Jones has been relegated back to the sidelines with another PED issue. 217 is stacked, and GSP’s return to action after four years away should be a huge deal. But what if it isn’t?
Here’s the interesting snippet from Meltzer’s report:
UFC did a marketing study and there was a result that surprised a lot of people, and spoke to the changes in the fan base and rapid turnaround. There was a shockingly high percentage of the current PPV buying audience that had never heard of St-Pierre. As it turned out, a large percentage of the PPV audience around today came into the sport with Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor, and have no historical knowledge of it prior to that point in time…
This is definitely a fascinating claim, but Meltzer doesn’t have a source, and as a Fight Pass member as well as someone who gets plenty of marketing survey emails from the UFC, I haven’t personally seen this specific question pop up in my inbox.
If this is the case, though, should we be surprised? In the four years since GSP’s controversial title defense against Johnny Hendricks, we’ve seen the rise and fall of Hendricks himself, Robbie Lawler as champ, the rise and fall of Ronda Rousey, the rise and rise of Conor McGregor, and dozens of other storylines. The sport has changed, and there are a ton of new fans that McGregor and Rousey brought in that simply don’t know much about a welterweight division that was dormant for a year after Hendricks won GSP’s vacated title, and even less are likely paying attention now that Tyron Woodley is the champion (I like Woodley, but he’s had two of the worst fights in UFC history in a row here as champ).
If new fans don’t know who GSP is, that’s a shame, but even when he was in his prime, most fans called him boring as he dominated the competition. Weird spot for the marketing team to be in.
