Pride FC History

The Pride Fighting Championships (Pride FC) was founded in Japan in 1997. Pride FC was formed to host mixed martial arts in Japan. In total Pride has held over sixty events and initially was one the most popular MMA organisation in the world. To this day, Pride FC has held the largest audience attendance record in MMA history of over 70,000 people in August 2002.

Pride FC founder Kakutugi thought of the idea of a mixed martial arts event which would put fighters of various disciplines head to head to find who the better fighter was. In order to gain popularity from the initial events Pride FC put a Japanese professional wrestler Nouhiko Takada with the legendary Gracie family champion Rickson Gracie. This bought a lot of positive publicity to Pride FC and attracted over 47,000 people to the attendance of the event as well as a large presence of the Japanese media. The success of the first event enabled its promoters to hold a regular series of mixed martial arts events.

Pride also managed to secure a television deal with Fuji Television as well as Pay per View revenues on newly formed satellite channel SKY PerfecTV.

In the year 2000, Pride FC introduced the open-weight tournament which allowed any fighter irrespective of his weight can fight. The tournament which was a huge success was held in two parts. Here sixteen top ranked fighters had to fight once and the remaining eight winners came back in 3 months in an elimination tournament.  This tournament was won by Mark Coleman a former UFC champion.

However despite the earlier success and growth of the event, in 2006 the Fuji Network cancelled their broad cast agreement with Pride on grounds that the other party failed in their contractual obligation. This resulted in huge revenue losses for Pride FC and as such is probably the reason why Pride started making the huge losses in profits and but the entire event on questionable territory.

In March of 2007, it was announced that the Pride FC had been acquired by Station Casinos owners the Fertitta brothers. The cost reportedly was in the USD$ 70 million area, which included all the fighters contracts and intellectual property rights. Due to the fact that the acquirers of Pride FC were also the owners of Ultimate Fighting Championships, it created huge excitement in the mixed martial arts community as such a merger would allow fighters to fight other from a different organization. Lorenzo Fertitta went on to announce publicly that he planned to operate PRIDE FC separately from Zuffa's two MMA brands, the UFC and WEC. But he did plan to have fighters crossing over to compete in unification bouts.

In summation, Pride FC has played an integral role in the growth of despite being bought out by Zuffa and closed down.