The Bottom Line: Blending Kickboxing with MMA Remains Uphill Climb

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Bellator MMA with its April 16 event in Italy will debut Bellator Kickboxing and make another attempt to pair kickboxing with mixed martial arts. On paper, it’s an idea that has its conceptual merits. It’s understandable that Bellator President Scott Coker continues to pursue the concept. In practice, however, it just hasn’t gained any traction to date. MMA fans haven’t shown an interest in gravitating en masse towards kickboxing, and there’s good reason to question whether they ever will.

Well before the Ultimate Fighting Championship ran its first event, Scott Coker was promoting kickboxing. Thus, it’s no surprise that he has confidence in the sport’s appeal. His interest in the sport goes deeper than simple sentimentality, though. While the UFC’s top decision makers looked at American boxing and pro wrestling for their promotional model, Coker gazed east towards Japan. In Japan, K-1 was king before Pride Fighting Championships came along. Kickboxing and MMA later promoted together produced some of the biggest ratings in the history of combat sports.

MMA is at this point more popular than kickboxing in most parts of the world, but there do remain enclaves, particularly in sections of Europe and Asia, where kickboxing is more popular than MMA. Kickboxing also has the benefit of being an exciting sport in its own right. Watching the best kickboxers in the world go at it can be thrilling when they don’t need to divide their focus with ground training.

In spite of these strengths, kickboxing in America has to date been a flop. The sport just hasn’t taken off over the years, despite plenty of effort. Spike TV attempted to build its Friday programming around combat sports -- boxing, MMA and kickboxing. Spike executives appeared invested in the concept, but Glory just couldn’t hold up its end from a ratings standpoint. The events were largely excellent in terms of competition, production and announcing. Fans just didn’t tune in.

Worse still was Bellator’s first “Dynamite” event in September, built around a mix of MMA and kickboxing. Despite a ton of advertising, a unique look, high-end production and Tito Ortiz in the main event, it drew the most disappointing ratings in the history of the company. The reactions from the live crowd in San Jose, California, also felt flat, as fans appeared uninterested in switching back and forth between two sports.

This consideration appears to have been taken into account, as the first Bellator Kickboxing event will air on delay after a Bellator MMA event. That follows a formula Spike TV knows well. The first season of “The Ultimate Fighter” was a hit in significant part because it aired after World Wrestling Entertainment’s popular “Monday Night Raw” program and was able to retain “Raw” viewers well. Kickboxing is probably best positioned after MMA as opposed to in the middle of it or on a completely separate night, although that still has the downside of meaning the show has to air quite late.

Bellator may have found the optimal way to present kickboxing in conjunction with MMA, but there still remain substantial obstacles to kickboxing taking off. In contrast to Japan, where MMA and kickboxing mixed well because K-1 had its own history of success and its own set of superstars, kickboxing in the west has no mainstream stars. The stars still need to be created, and it is difficult to do so when there’s so much more star power associated with MMA.

A solution to that basic problem in the past has been to bring stars from one sport into another. Unfortunately, that’s difficult to achieve today because there’s so much more money in MMA than in kickboxing. In the past, MMA stars like Don Frye and Quinton Jackson took kickboxing bouts because of the money in it. Today, elite standup fighters are tempted to train heavily on the ground to try to make it in the greener pastures of MMA. The incentives need to be stronger to keep the best kickboxers in kickboxing in order for kickboxing to thrive in the medium to long term.

All other considerations aside, MMA remains an unlikely ally in the effort to popularize kickboxing, because MMA itself may be the biggest factor holding kickboxing back. Kickboxing is an exciting sport, but MMA offers so many of the same thrills and it is thriving as is. Rugby and Australian Rules football may be perfectly viable television entities in the United States in an alternate dimension where the NFL does not exist, but the NFL does exist. American football is too popular and successful for similar sports to rise much in popularity. Likewise, MMA is not exactly undersaturated, leaving fans scrambling for a similar alternative.

Bellator’s efforts to branch out into kickboxing aren’t necessarily doomed to failure. There are reasons to believe in kickboxing, and a premier MMA organization is the best hope for widespread popularization of the sport. However, there are more reasons to bet against the endeavor than to bet on it. Bellator would be better off in the long run keeping its focus squarely on its growth as an MMA organization.