UFC and WWE merging into one company?

When someone told me about this the other day I thought for sure they must be joking. However, I later looked into it and sure enough, WWE and UFC are planning a merger that will come together in an official sense later on this year unless something goes horribly wrong.

This doesn't seem like a big deal until you look at the details underneath the deal and discover that there could be some really silly shaking up of the UFC system, which I feel is already rigged to some degree, and make it even worse.

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I guess you could say that I don't really have a problem with this and from what I can tell it appears to be some sort of market manipulation and perhaps even a clever way for both independent organizations to dodge some level of taxes. Everyone loves money afterall.

The only really concerning thing to me is that when this goes though, it has been stated that Vince McMahon will become the Executive Chairman of the new combined organization, which is tentatively known as "TKO." Nobody will refer to it outside of the stock markets, but that is the rumor.

With Vince as the Executive Chairman of the overall company this means that he will be the second in command of the entire organization and will also be the head of the board of directors. This will put him above even Dana White in terms of the overall direction of the company.

The combined valuation of the new company is $21.4 billion, with around $12 of that being attributed to the value of UFC. So my question is "why would they want McMahon so far near the top of the decision making chain?"

Vince is a pretty fantastic businessman, that much is for sure. He understands how to run a business because back when I was a kid WWE (then WWF) was something that was actually pretty poorly managed until Vince got it on track eventually becoming the only real player in the game. He took a niche sport and made it global and hugely valuable. I don't really watch a great deal of WWE anymore, but there was a time that I really enjoyed it and looked forward to it.

We all know that the "fights" are rigged in pro wrestling, and my fear is that Vince's penchant for the theatrics in WWE might make its way into the UFC.

I have complained in the past about how UFC was kind of turning into WWE with people getting title shots and going up in the rankings based not upon their actually fighting prowess but by how much hype they can generate via interviews and social media - you know, kind of like when wrestlers cut promos in WWE. A wrestler's popularity depends a great deal on the persona that they create and doesn't really have a great deal to do with how talented they are in the ring.

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I'll use the Rock and Hulk Hogan as prime examples of this. Both of them did amazing promos and did a wonderful job of getting the crowd worked up into a frenzy. In the ring though, this was a different story. Both of them were actually comparatively dreadful as far as their in-ring abilities are concerned and especially with Hulk Hogan, there are tons of other wrestlers who said they absolutely hated working with them because they were sloppy and had a tendency to injure other wrestlers with their mistakes.

Yet the crowd loved them and therefore they got all the big matches and in turn, the big money. I fear that with Vince McMahon so high up in the TKO hierarchy, that we could see this happening as well. We could see manipulation of the wellness policy happen even more frequently in order to favor more gigantic and ripped looking fighters and people who have not yet earned their spot for a title fight may end up getting it based more so upon how many followers they have in Instagram rather than their win/loss record and time spent actually in the octagon. We need only look as far as Jon Jones to see that this is already happening in UFC and there are a number of other situations like multiple Chael Sonnen fights that he didn't deserve but got anyway because he created enough hype online and on the microphone.

UFC doesn't publicly praise this sort of thing, but they do engage in it in an ever-increasing manner. There are favorite fighters that the crowd loves, and I feel as though they receive special treatment as far as which fights they are awarded and how well the are compensated. This works out terribly for anyone who isn't a native-English speaker as well since they simply aren't capable of creating the sort of hype that the global audience demands.

In the end though, I know that this, like every other sport, is all about money and not so much the actual sport itself. I can't really imagine Vince being able to make UFC better but luckily for him, he doesn't really have to do a great deal seeing as how there really isn't any serious competition for UFC in the MMA world.

I'm just surprised by the fact that Vince would even be considered for this position because he has been vocally dismissive about MMA in the past. It kind of got swept under the rug, but Vince's son Shane actually attempted to acquire UFC many years ago but Vince intervened and squashed the deal.

I really hope that Vince can leave his WWE notions in WWE and treat any decisions that TKO makes about UFC separate. If the two crossover too much, we could see UFC lose a lot more credibility than they already have.