Mixed Martial Arts-New stars and storytelling to drive Coker's new MMA chapter

June 3 - Mixed martial arts promoter Scott Coker is returning to the fight game with an as-yet-unnamed promotion that will launch in January, and though much has changed since he was last involved, identifying new stars and telling their stories will be key to its success.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) continues to be the dominant global brand in cage-fighting, but as the former frontman for Strikeforce and Bellator, Coker built two of the promotions that came close to threatening its position, and his return has sent a frisson of excitement through the combat sports world.

"We're going to build this company from the ground up, we're going to sign the new stars of the sport and we're going to have scouts all over the world looking to unearth the next diamond in the rough," Coker told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"I'm really excited about it. I don't think anyone has the record that I have in what I'm going to call fighter procurement, and star identification is a big part of this, and no-one has done that in the way that Strikeforce did, or Bellator did."

Having started Strikeforce as a kickboxing promotion, Coker pivoted it to MMA in 2006 before selling it to the UFC's parent company five years later, and he spent a decade at Bellator before stepping down after it too was sold in 2024.

Famed for discovering the likes of former UFC champions Ronda Rousey and Daniel Cormier in his Strikeforce days, Coker's comeback is in a new media landscape, where streaming and social media have taken over from linear TV and pay-per-view.

Much of the UFC's current popularity can be traced back to its reality TV show "The Ultimate Fighter", which launched in 2005 and helped bring the sport into the mainstream, and Coker has hired Kevin Kay, one of the prime movers behind that series, for his new venture.

"When you think about where our fans are today, they're on their phones and they're on their tablets, that's just how it is. We're still attractive for the 18-34 demographic which is attractive for sponsors, but when you talk about linear television, I'm not sure kids are watching MMA on legacy television," Coker said.

BROADCAST PARTNERS

"We're talking to all the different broadcast partners, there has to be a streaming component to it because that's where the fans are, and this is going to be global."

A recent one-off MMA card staged by Jake Paul's Most Valuable Promotions garnered an audience of some 17 million viewers on streaming service Netflix, and though Coker noted that success, he says his new promotion will feature a more traditional tournament format.

"We're going to be great storytellers, and we're going to follow these fighters throughout the year, through their journey. We're going to put them into a single-elimination format that everybody understands - if you lose, you go home, if you win, you advance," he said.

"There's always a tournament component to it (MMA), so this is nothing that's ridiculous or hasn't been done before - it's just we're going to do it where the cadence of the event lends itself to great storytelling." REUTERS