Structural Balance in the UFC
Although Mixed Martial Arts focuses on respect towards an opponent, the UFC has transformed this sport into one involving entertainment and trash talk, rather than respectful combat. Hence, understanding the strong and weak ties in the UFC fighter community has become essential as it is a big part of the business as a whole and it helps improve the pay per views for every fight.
The biggest fights in the UFC involve two fighters who have a negative relationship between each other. Hence, the UFC administration tries to identify these ties and strongly promote these feuds, in order to sell more tickets. For this example, we will consider the ties between Connor Mcgregor and his team, and Khabib Nurmagomedov and his team. They are two of the biggest fighters in the UFC and understanding the relationships that they have will give us a generalization of the overall dynamic in the UFC.
The red lines in the graph signify a negative relationship while the green lines signify a positive relationship. We can see that there is structural balance in the UFC due to the fact that there are either all positive relationships between three fighters, or there are two negative and one positive relationships. The UFC can use this information while deciding which fighters should compete with each other, in order to leverage existing rivalries and maximizing pay per view earnings. Furthermore, the fact that there is structural balance means that these rivalries will remain for a long time, hence serving as greater profit for the UFC as they can now create numerous fights every year.
This theory can be applied to almost any network of people in any industry, hence making it very important to understand. From the above example, we can see that this theory of structural balance and positive and negative relationships may form the basis of UFC’s approach to assigning fights.
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