How Popular is UFC in Middle East?

Beylerbey said:
They are pretty terrible at football. Nowhere near South-American and Western-European teams.



So you can't even name one sport.
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Egyptians are the best in the world at Body buidling, squash, wrestling. The best soccer player in the world today is Egyptian!
North African arab countries are the best in the world in kickboxing and soon in MMA. They're so good at soccer too.
Iraq just won the biggest and most important asian competition in all of Asia!
Even small arab countries like Qatar are on the verge of winning soccer world cop in a couple of years!
& more importantly, most arab countries are so good at the game of war (toughest sport in the world!)
 
Soccer is the biggest sport in the middle East (like most of the world) and probably basketball is second place almost everywhere. Today UFC getting more exposure and popularity like all over the world and khabib certainly help with being super religious and spread of Islam. But overall it's still very niche.
 
Beylerbey said:
The Middle-East is a huge area with a lot of diversity in culture and sports. As a general rule of thumb, Arabs suck at sports, including the martial arts, they're kind of like Indians in that regard. Turkey and Iran have a culture of wrestling, and especially in Iran wrestling is absolutely huge (they also have by far the best, most enthusiastic crowds when it comes to wrestling tournaments). If you extend the Middle-East to include North-Africa, then Moroccans and to a lesser extent Algerians and Tunisians are good at kickboxing and kickboxing is popular there, mostly because of Moroccan diaspora living in the Netherlands like Badr Hari becoming stars in Morocco too.

The Middle-East has one thing going for it and that's diaspora. Lots of the diaspora from countries like Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey etc. who live in Europe nowadays practice martial arts, and they're a bunch of fighters from that region fighting out of European countries. Just enter a random MMA gym, wrestling gym, kickboxing gym in countries like Germany, Holland, Sweden, etc. and I can guarantee you, the majority of the people there will be Middle-Easterners, Africans and Eastern Europeans. Justbleedism is intertwined with the immigrant mentality.
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arabs suck at sports ?
 
Zarate said:
According to the mainstream media in Turkey Khabib is a famous Boxer.

There's your answer.
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probably just the producers decision based on the fact that "mixed martial arts" is a stupid name for the sport and that the "ultimate fighting championship" sounds like tryhard comicbook shit.
 
Post 2 Decision said:
MMA is niche everywhere lol

It's just a little more popular in Murica
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Just bc it’s not super popular like baskets ball, tennis etc does not make it niche.

no matter where the UFC goes around the world it sells out stadiums does regular ppv with large numbers and has athletes that make millions.

jousting is a “niche” sport.

In the 18-35 demographic most westerners have heard of fighters like GSP, Silva, Jones even if they don’t tune in just like most ppl have heard of Tyson fury and wilder despite not watching boxing.

it is popular enough that ppl now the stars without watching the sport.
It’s popular enough that they make computer games out of it.

that is main stream.
 
The Chosen said:
Isn’t it popular in Iran and the former soviet republics? I guess you could call that Eurasia though
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Yeah its big in iran. But i don't really think of iran as the middle east. Just like if someone spoke about africa you wouldn't think of Algeria. The other countries are in central asia.
 
Middle East like in UAE would be great to go on a vacation if not for the archaic laws that forbid little things like drinking and hooking up at a bar.

As for popularity I have had several friends that have been there for periods of time and they say sports of all kinds are huge there. Soccer may be #1 but basketball is pretty big and with Khabib I can imagine MMA as well.
 
MMAFAN2 said:
No,it isn’t
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My family is from egypt and I have lots of egyptian friends. Also a quick google says its the #2 sport in Egypt in terms of popularity after soccer--which lines up exactly with what i've been told/heard
 
No one remembered Brave CF (Chimaev went to UFC from there)? Also Bellator held events in Israel and of course there is mma promotions in Israel.
 
MMAFAN2 said:
I guarantee you mma is a sport they can’t buy with money if they wanted to
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Didn't read the article but you are kinda wrong. For example, in amateur mma there is few Dagestani who represent Bahrain and one of them is a HW mma world champ. I think I've seen somewhere also guy with surname like "Magomedov" representing Kuwait or something.
 
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