This is the second story in a three-part series about the UFC Performance Institute. The first story looked at the technology being used at the PI; this one examines how the PI is being used by athletes other than MMA fighters—and how the UFC is using its unique positioning in U.S. sports to expand internationally.
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On a 100-degree day in sunny Las Vegas, a contingent from the Sacramento Kings’ performance team took a break from the NBA Summer League to check out the UFC Performance Institute just a few miles off the Strip. When later asked about the reason for their visit, the Kings told SportTechie that their health and performance team “regularly visits other organizations to see how they work and continue to learn.” But tours of the performance institute aren’t mere courtesy visits. For the UFC, they’re leads to procure new business.
Since opening its state-of-the-art Performance Institute in 2017, the UFC has welcomed its rostered athletes to train for free, with more than two dozen having moved to the desert to take advantage of the accommodations. But the UFC also opens its doors for athletes from other sports, including NBA and NFL players. This is the UFC’s side hustle, providing a pay-to-use service that allows elite athletes to train alongside world-class MMA fighters.
“We get a ton of NBA guys in the off-season, especially during the Summer League, ” says James Kimball, the vice president of operations at UFC Performance Institute. “There’s a lot of pro athletes that live in Vegas in the off-season, so they come through often.”
The UFC’s global headquarters sits on an eight-acre campus that features two buildings and plenty of room to keep growing. The larger building is home to the UFC HQ and Performance Institute, while the newer 130,000 square-foot facility across the parking lot—UFC Apex—houses a production and event space for smaller fights. As for a potential third building, Kimball says the company is considering a separate performance facility that would serve non-UFC athletes and meet their ever-growing demand for UFC training services.
Vegas, after all, is still a young boom town when it comes to sports.
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Once thought of as a taboo destination for professional sports leagues because of all the gambling, Sin City became home to the NHL’s Vegas Knights during the 2017-18 season, with the team making to the Stanley Cup finals in its inaugural season. The NFL’s Raiders will move there from Oakland in 2020. Major League Baseball has yet to open a big-league franchise here, though the Oakland A’s Triple-A team, the Las Vegas Aviators, recently moved into their new $150 million ballpark in Summerlin, Nevada, 10 miles west of the neon lights. “It’s transformed itself,” Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber recently said of Vegas when discussing it as a potential future market for an MLS team.
In 2018, two months before announcing a deal to be the NBA’s official gaming partner, MGM Resorts CEO Jim Murren predicted that an NBA team would relocate to Vegas in the early 2020s and likely share a home with the Knights at T-Mobile Arena. (For now, the NBA’s Summer League calls Vegas home, with teams, executives, star players and fans relying on the showcase to test emerging players as well as new rules and new technologies.)
“I feel like every professional sport and league is going to have a team here in five years’ time,” Kimball says. “And that’s the thing: we’re not their competitors.”
The UFC views itself as a strategic partner that can offer elite training services, both for the local teams in Vegas and those visiting on road trips. A variety of third parties already take advantage of the Performance Institute and its trainers, sports scientists, physical therapists, nutritionists, and high-tech equipment that includes a hypoxic room, pool treadmill and bilateral integrated force plates. Its roster of external clients includes various divisions of U.S. military and special forces; Olympians, including 2012 Olympic gold medal BMX rider Connor Fields; various NBA teams and individual NBA players, including All-Stars; NHL teams seeking to learn more about combative tactics; NFL players; and athletes from other combat sports, including professional boxers.
“I feel like every professional sport and league is going to have a team here in five years’ time,” Kimball says of Vegas. “And that’s the thing: we’re not their competitors.”
“Our core mission is obviously UFC fighters,” says Duncan French, the vice president of performance at UFC Performance Institute. “But because of the nature of our expertise that we have—and because of the visibility in Vegas—people have taken an interest. We say it’s because of our IP and our methods, how we bring it all under one roof into a fully-integrated strategy, and how we can truly improve performance on many different levels.”
Many franchises in traditional sports, such as the NBA’s Kings or the MLS’s Portland Timbers, have their own performance divisions to help rostered athletes train and recover. But French points out that teams in such leagues often copy each other’s tactics and methods. “If the Milwaukee Bucks are doing it, then the Chicago Bulls are going to do it. It’s like, ‘We’ve got to keep up with the Joneses,’ ” says French. “We do the opposite. We go in the opposite direction. And that’s true innovation, right? We don’t have immediate competitors where we’re saying, ‘Oh, they’re doing that, we need to follow suit.’ We’re essentially driving up towards ourselves and that’s something that’s unique and attractive to people.”
There’s already proof of it on a much larger scale.
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To meet international demand, the UFC recently opened its second performance institute in Shanghai, China, in a building that’s three times larger than the original facility in Vegas. One of its clients is the Chinese Olympic Committee, which has sent its rowing, canoe, kayak and speed skating teams to train.
The UFC says the 93,000-square-foot facility, which opened its doors in June, is the world’s largest state-of-the-art MMA training and development facility. In addition to facilitating third-party clients such the Chinese Olympic Committee, it also hopes to use the facility as a training hub to develop UFC talent from mainland China and the greater Asia-Pacific region.
Unlike the Vegas PI, which doesn’t have an option for athletes-in-training to live on premises, the Shanghai PI is designed to be more like a European youth soccer academy, where teams such as FC Barcelona recruit, house and train emerging athletes in an immersive program that could eventually feed them into the first team. In Shanghai, the UFC offers hospitality suites so athletes can stay for fight camps, which are condensed periods of training ahead of a match. Also unlike Vegas, the Shanghai performance institute offers skill coaches in addition to nutritionists and trainers, to help develop fundamentals. The facility also has a built-in space dedicated to producing live events and local programming, and hosting smaller flights like the Apex building in Vegas.
UFC President Dana White called the Shanghai PI “another game changer for the sport, UFC, and potential athletes throughout Asia,” when first announcing it at the end of 2018. “We know there is a ton of talent throughout Asia and now we will be able to find them and offer them all the incredible training, nutrition, and physical therapy that UFC fighters are getting in the Performance Institute at our headquarters in Las Vegas, right there in China,” he said. The vision is to use these satellite UFC performance institutes, both in Shanghai and elsewhere throughout the world as the UFC expands internationally, as a catalyst to rapidly accelerate the skill level and UFC-readiness of mixed martial artists in each facility’s respective region.
“UFC’s next market for true international growth is China,” says French. “We have about 570 athletes on the roster and about 10 of those are in China. We want that number to be 50, 60, 70, over the next several years.”
It’s not that UFC plans to significantly expand its roster of athletes and cannibalize its own business by putting on an increasing amount of shows. Rather, it hopes international development will increase the caliber of athletes on the existing roster, and attract interest from fans in important regions, such as Asia, as local stars start to emerge on the global stage.
“The quality of fights is always what we’re trying to build upon,” Kimball says. “There’s probably some dead weight on the roster, just like any team or organization. So you always want the quality to improve, and that’s what we do.”
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The UFC has proven this theory in Brazil, which contributes 70 to 80 fighters to the UFC roster and is among the fighting league’s largest international markets. The UFC also points to Canada, which was a hot market when the Montreal-based two-division champion Georges St-Pierre was coming up. “If you invest in talent in that market the fan base will grow with it,” says French. “So we’ve invested in terms of permanent infrastructure into China to do that.”
Mexico is next. The UFC has already scouted a facility in Mexico City and plans to open its third performance institute there next year, with the goal of adding as many as 30 to 50 athletes from Mexico and other surrounding countries to the UFC roster over the next several years. “UFC doesn’t really have big Mexican stars. We used to have a former heavyweight champ who was Mexican, but we can count on two hands our number of Mexican athletes,” says Kimball. “And that’s the growth model for the PI: we build these around the globe.”
In lockstep with expanding its network of high-end performance institutes, the UFC’s next major project will be establishing a standardized method of training and evaluating existing and emerging athletes. With the opening of the Shanghai PI, the UFC hosted its first academy combine in China, which offered athletes a platform to showcase their skills and abilities for a potential career in MMA or a scholarship to the UFC Academy. A “tornado of kids from Tibet, Beijing and Shanghai were all tested against a threshold of UFC parameters,” says French.
“We’re so excited because the UFC had never even considered anything like this in terms of developing our own talent,” says Kimball. “Typically fighters came to the UFC; whether be it a manager sending a link to the matchmakers and saying, ‘Hey, check this guy out.’ Now, we’re taking ownership of the process.”
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