How Many PPV Buys Will UFC 249 Generate?

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The #UFC249 card is ready to be unleashed! pic.twitter.com/bjjq2psFHq

— UFC (@ufc) April 30, 2020

Sign up for ESPN+ right here, and you can then stream UFC 249 live on your smart TV, computer, phone, tablet or streaming device via the ESPN app.

Following numerous setbacks and interventions from both California Governor Gavin Newsom and the Walt Disney Company, UFC 249 is finally set to go on without a hitch on May 9 at the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida. The pay-per-view event will be the first of three scheduled cards to be hosted at the Sunshine State venue, with the other two shows slated for May 13 and May 16. Both of them will presumably be shown on ESPN due to the current lack of sporting events.

While three shows in a seven-day period may seem like a lot for the world’s largest MMA organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship needs to deliver 34 more fight cards before the end of the year to earn the $600 million from its media rights agreement with ESPN—money both the promotion and its parent company Endeavor desperately need. Both companies have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Endeavor is looking to raise an additional $250 million by June in order to keep operations running after already announcing a series of layoffs that affected around one-third of the company.

Which brings us back to UFC 249. Although the exact split between the promotion and ESPN is unknown, according to a recent report in Sports Business, the UFC still “earns a significant share of revenue from each residential pay-per-view buy,” giving the promotion another means to help alleviate its staggering $2.3 billion debt load. While overall PPV numbers have decreased since ESPN+ became the exclusive distributor of UFC pay-per-views, the right combination of fighters can still yield solid returns for the organization. On Disney’s February earnings call, it was revealed that UFC 246 on Jan. 18, which featured the long-awaited return of Conor McGregor, broke one million PPV buys—the highest total since the UFC-ESPN deal has been in effect. That’s a far cry from the record-shattering 2.4 million buys that UFC 229 was estimated to bring in when McGregor faced off against lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, but it’s certainly nothing at which to scoff.

A McGregor PPV buy rate, however, is most definitely the exception to the rule. Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje have steadily been growing in popularity within the hardcore MMA fan base for some time now, but they’re still far below “Mystic Mac” in terms of a casual audience following. In fact, between the two of them, only Ferguson has been a headliner or co-headliner of a pay-per-view, as he faced Kevin Lee in the UFC 216 main event and served as a co-main against Anthony Pettis at UFC 229. The reason that’s important to note: According to a study done by Dr. Paul Gift at Pepperdine University in November, those two bouts have the most significant impact on variable pay-per-view sales, with each subsequent bout providing very little boost, if any, in terms of consumer interest. The main event also has a much higher statistical pull compared to the co-main event when it comes to overall buy rate, meaning more weight should be placed on Ferguson’s UFC 216 appearance—which brought in an estimated 200,000 buys—than his co-main event slot next to McGregor-Nurmagomedov.

What little we can infer from the new PPV buy rates under the ESPN+ model doesn’t bode well for UFC 249. UFC 236, which featured an intriguing interim lightweight title fight between Dustin Poirier and Max Holloway and a co-main event of Israel Adesanya-Kelvin Gastelum, was estimated to have fallen short of the 100,000-buy mark. As this was the first event to be exclusively distributed through ESPN’s streaming service, some of the blame can be put on the shift from several options to a sole-source provider of content. Considering that UFC 237 was rumored to have performed even worse, however, it’s unlikely the move drove down the numbers by a substantial amount.

With little historical pay-per-view data from either fighter to go on, television ratings may be the next best indicator to determine their respective drawing powers. The last time Ferguson headlined a television event was in November 2016, when he fought Rafael dos Anjos and drew a middling 860,000 viewers on Fox Sports 1. Gaethje’s ratings history is surprisingly worse, with “The Highlight” bringing in a mere 828,000 viewers viewers against Edson Barboza on ESPN, 724,000 viewers against Michael Johnson on FS1 and a lowly 596,000 viewers in a headliner with James Vick. Even a main event against Dustin Poirier at UFC on Fox 29 only did around two million viewers for the 31-year-old, making it the fourth-lowest-watched UFC event on the network.

Even though the historical numbers don’t seem to bode well for UFC 249’s buy rate, there is a huge X factor at play—a lack of sports due to the pandemic. It’s no secret that sports fans are starved for content, and with nowhere else to turn, they’ve started tuning in to events like the NFL Draft, which shattered its previous ratings record earlier this month. Given that UFC 249 will most likely be the only live sporting event to be broadcast on May 9, the card might very well receive a boost in viewership from a casual audience looking for anything to watch. That boost is nowhere guaranteed, however, as UFC Fight Night 170 in March only averaged 672,000 viewers despite being one of the few live sporting events being broadcast at the time.

Taking all these variables into account, one could reasonably surmise that UFC 249 generates somewhere between 125,000 and 175,000 pay-per-view buys. Hardcore fans certainly love the card that has been put together, but Ferguson and Gaethje are not historically strong draws and the math tells us that the main event is the most important piece in a casual consumer’s decision. Coupled with the fact that unemployment is soaring around the globe due to COVID-19—that limits discretionary spending across the board—it’s not hard to imagine that casual sports fans might tune in to the prelims and opt to pass on a $64.99 pay-per-view featuring a headliner between two people they have never heard of before. Due to the limited intel we have on PPV numbers since the ESPN+ deal, we may never get a chance to verify how accurate that prediction ends up being, but either way, it appears that come violence will be back on the menu in a little more than a week.