Can we admit that maybe everybody got what they wanted out of the UFC's Demetrious Johnson "trade"?
In most sports trading a winner for a loser is a bad deal, but maybe the exchange between the UFC and ONE Championship further highlights why fight sports are different.
Because apparently we are sometimes in danger of forgetting, Demetrious Johnson felt the need to remind us this past weekend that he is incredibly good at fighting. At ONE Championship’s debut event on Amazon Prime, he rematched Adriano Moraes, a dude who looked to be at least two weight classes above him – and put him to sleep with one of the most beautifully efficient and frankly damn near flawless sequences we’ve ever seen in MMA.
But you know how it goes. There’s no way Johnson could recapture the ONE Championship, uh, championship (more on this company’s confusing naming conventions later) without it prompting us all to wonder: What the hell was the UFC thinking in letting a fighter like him get away? And furthermore, to essentially “trade” him? For Ben Askren?!? I mean, everybody’s smarter with the benefit of hindsight and all, but come on.
This is a game we don’t get to play as often in MMA as people in the stick-and-ball sports do, where trades are a common part of the business. They’re used to debating which side got the better end of the deal and which one got fleeced. But for them, the calculation also tends to be simpler. If you gave up a generational talent like Johnson – a guy who’s definitely one of the all-time pound-for-pound greats, and can still produce amazing performances at the age of 36 – for a dude who went 1-2 and then retired just in time to get an artificial hip? Well then, brother, that was a bad trade. If that same dude came out of retirement only to get knocked out by a YouTube boxer, all while the guy you gave up continues to be consistently rad? Then it would really only underscore the point.
But MMA is not like those other sports. There, winning is the only thing that matters. If you give up a guy who keeps winning in order to get a guy who immediately starts losing, you made a bad trade. But fight sports aren’t just about finding winners – they’re about finding draws.
Consider what the UFC got when it acquired Askren. He came in, won a fight over Robbie Lawler via referee error, and then got slept by the now iconic flying knee from Jorge Masvidal. That, in turn, helped set off the Year of the Masvidal. He briefly became a really big deal, thanks in large part to that knockout of Askren. A few months later he won the totally fake and yet also pretty fun BMF title. That then somehow vaulted him into back-to-back title shots against Kamaru Usman, the second of which ended when his head was launched into orbit.
Point is, you could absolutely make the case that picking up Askren led to the win that cause a major spike in Masvidal’s visibility and popularity, which the UFC managed to profit from, at least for a time. And if what the UFC gave up to get that was Johnson, a fighter who had never been all that profitable for the promotion even at the very peak of his powers inside the cage, wasn’t that actually a good trade for the UFC to make? And, look around, it’s not as if the men’s flyweight division is languishing in Johnson’s absence. You’ve got the Assassin Baby and Figgy Smalls, which probably only reinforces the UFC’s long-held belief that it’s the brand that has value, that the fighters are more or less interchangeable, and that someone new will always show up.
But then, I’d also argue that it was a good trade for ONE. (Okay, dammit, I can’t ignore the name any longer. It used to be ONE FC. Now it’s ONE Championship. Its first event on Amazon Prime was called ONE Championship on Prime Video 1, and it was headlined by Moraes vs. Johnson 2? Come the fuck on. This is why you don’t choose a number as your name. But I digress). Think about what ONE gave up: an American wrestler who beat everybody but rarely convinced anyone to give a shit about any of it. Then think about what ONE got: an all-time great who still feels important to the hardcores, and who’s down for some wacky shit like a mixed rules match every now and then.
The trade also worked out decently for both Johnson and Askren individually. Johnson had begun to bristle at the UFC’s lack of respect for his skills and the American MMA media’s constant confusion over why he couldn’t sell pay-per-views. Then he got to go to a promotion where he was instantly a big deal (and where his longtime coach was reeeaaal chummy with the bosses). Even Askren finally got to have his UFC moment, and while getting posterized probably wasn’t all that great, do you really think he ends up with that Jake Paul payday (again posterized, but at least for more money) without that stint in the UFC?
What I’m saying is, the whole situation highlights how fight sports – the sports business that is constantly in pitch mode, without the luxury of storied franchises or built-in traditions to sell tickets and TV deals – operate on a more complicated model than most established team sports.
Fight promoters aren’t just looking for the best fighters, because sometimes the best fighters don’t make them the best money. They need winners, sure, but they also need losers. And with the right losers, lucrative winners can be more or less manufactured – at least for a time.