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By Zach Arnold

DREAM 6 on September 23rd at Saitama Super Arena ended in a bang in the ring with Gegard Mousasi’s Middleweight tournament win over Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza. Outside of the ring, the event (much like the promotion’s business in general) ended with a thud.

DREAM 6 drew a paltry 9.0% TV rating on Tokyo Broadcasting System, one of Japan’s largest free-to-air broadcast networks. The single-digit rating is likely the final nail-in-the-coffin for the struggling PRIDE-wannabe promotion ran by ex-DSE executives and K-1 matchmaker Sadaharu Tanigawa.

Strangely, however, you wouldn’t know that the end is coming if you lived in the online MMA bubble world of message boards and blogs. There were more web sites, message boards, and chat rooms in English covering the event than you could possibly imagine. The only theory I can come up with up personally is that you have a group of MMA fans who miss PRIDE so much that, in their psyche and mental make-up, are desperately trying to recreate the glory days of PRIDE in their mind by rallying around DREAM.

The promotion, honestly, was a doomed concept from the beginning. K-1 was not going to spend the same amount of cash on PRIDE lite as the old DSE executives used to. Second, this project did not have the 100% stamp of approval by Kazuyoshi Ishii, who was in jail when the company started. Third, the promotion was built around no heavyweight Japanese stars whatsoever.

With the failure of DREAM to garner a double-digit rating, the project is on life support. Certainly, don’t expect K-1 to give up on the MMA market. However, it should be expected that Ishii will come back with an MMA product in his vision and creative mold.

If there are some painful lessons to learn from the failures of DREAM, then we should highlight them right now:

1) Star power draws ratings, not good and pure fighters. Fighters are entertainers in the eyes of most casual fight fans, first and foremost.

2) Race still matters very heavily in terms of Japanese marketing.

3) Without Japanese stars in bigger weight classes, MMA will remain a niche product in the country. Fight fans want to see larger-than-life characters put on a show. Your general, casual MMA fan in Japan is not interested in watching someone who looks like them physically. They want to see ‘monsters’ and athletes who not only fight well but also fit some stereotypical molds of what a fighter is supposed to look like.

4) When WCW collapsed in the United States, those fans did not transfer over to WWE. WWE simply could not and would not reach out to that fan base. If you compare the ratings for US pro-wrestling today versus a decade ago, the current scene with WWE only is drawing 75% less fans than WWE & WCW combined during the Monday Night Wars. The same parallels can be applied to the Japanese fight scene. When PRIDE died, those fans never came back. DREAM was viewed as a K-1 playtoy; nothing more, nothing less. It wasn’t PRIDE in the eyes of the casual PRIDE fans. Those casual fans aren’t coming back to watch any other Japanese or worldwide MMA product.

5) If DREAM never stood a long-term chance in Japan with K-1’s power, then UFC doesn’t have a prayer for making money on a major scale in Japan.

It is becoming very clear that as many mid-sized MMA promotions start to fold up and close shop, UFC will be the only player in the business to make money on a major level. Now, the big question that arises from this situation is this: Will the MMA market expand worldwide with UFC ruling the world (think: NBA) or will the market contract and have a ceiling in terms of the amount of money it can generate (think: WWE)? DREAM is likely dead or about to morph into something else. Elite XC is on life support and has to hope that their October 4th event in Florida draws a big TV rating. If it doesn’t, it’s game over for them and game over for anyone who wants to compete with UFC in the MMA marketplace.