One Championship boss Chatri Sityodtong taking on UFC and the sporting world

It seems like ‘crazy talk’, but the brains behind the MMA’s newest $1 billion business has some truly outrageous goals. This is the story of their rapid rise - and how they pulled it off.

ONE Championship founder Chatri Sityodtong went from Wall Street to fight club.

Bigger than the NBA and NFL?

That is the lofty ambition of combat sports promoter Chatri Sityodtong, whose ONE Championship company now rivals the UFC as the most lucrative mixed martial arts organisation in the world.

“I think we’ve really hit we struck a chord with millennial and Gen Y audiences around the world, and there’s no reason why we can’t be the number one sports property in the world, not just combat sport,” Sityodtong told Code Sport.

“Now, of course, that sounds like crazy talk. But several years ago I predicted that ONE would cross the $1 billion mark in terms of our valuation, and a couple of years later we had crossed the $1 billion mark. And so the sky’s the limit.”

ONE and UFC are the only mixed martial arts companies valued over 10 figures.

The primary reason for ONE’s dramatic rise since Sityodtong founded the company in 2011, is cornering the Asian market.

ONE Championship founder Chatri Sityodtong believes his company can become the biggest sports organisation in the world.

While UFC is dominant in North and South America, and Europe, ONE’s appeal in the populous Asian region has catapulted it into a stratosphere most sporting companies can only dream of.

But make no mistake, ONE is coming for the UFC’s audience.

“We try to think of ourselves as the Luke Skywalker to UFC’s Darth Vader,” Sityodtong said.

“I have a tremendous amount of respect for the UFC in terms of a business. I don’t necessarily respect their impact on society, their impact on kids.

“Our finish rate hovers around 70 per cent versus UFC at 40 per cent and Bellator around 38 per cent, and so you do see the most aggressive, most phenomenal martial arts actions by the world’s greatest martial arts, these world champions.

Finish rates in ONE Championship are higher than any other mixed martial arts organisation.

“But what you don’t see is people insulting religions (former UFC champion Conor McGregor once described Muslim rival Khabib Nurmagomedov’s veiled wife as “a towel”), and people insulting children of their opponents. We don’t see that because we don’t condone that behaviour.

“I’m not saying ONE is perfect, but I’m saying definitely that we are 180 degrees polar opposite of the UFC in everything we do. The only commonality is that we both have the world’s best rosters of fighters. I think they have like 670 fighters, we have around 600 fighters, and there’s eight billion people. So there’s enough space and room for both organisations, right?”

Sixteen years ago, Sityodtong was running hedge funds on Wall Street.

He’d come from abject poverty in Thailand. His family went broke during the Asian financial crisis, his father abandoned them, and Sityodtong moved to the US, delivering Chinese food while studying and eventually thriving in New York’s finance district.

A lifelong martial artist, Sityodtong felt the calling towards combat despite running multi-billion dollar funds.

“When I emigrated to America, I never thought I was going to come back to Asia again because, you know, I was living in shame, embarrassment and poverty, and we were going to start a new life in America,” he said.

“But every region of the world, I noticed, had several multi-billion sports properties.

Kansas City Chiefs star NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

Man City’s Erling Haaland during an English Premier League match against Liverpool.

“In the US it’s NFL, Major League Baseball, NBA, these are worth tens of billions of dollars. The NBA is worth $70 billion, and the NFL is worth $120 billion.

“Then you go to Europe, it’s the same thing. It’s F1 (Formula One), Champions League, it’s Bundesliga, the Premier League. And Asia at the time, there’s nothing yet. There’s four billion people that live here, and there’s nothing.”

He first set up Evolve MMA in 2008, and three years later launched ONE.

In March this year, they signed a deal with Seven Network to stream their events free in Australia on the 7Plus app, and their fights are now shown in 190 countries, while they are backed by some of the biggest investment firms on the planet.

“We have raised about $520 million from institutional investors, from the likes of Sequoia Capital – which is arguably the most veneered venture capital firm out of Silicon Valley, having funded Oracle, Yahoo, YouTube and Apple, any of the most incredible tech companies – we’re their first sports investment,” Sityodtong said.

ONE Championship has established a huge following in Asia, largely due to the brutal and thrilling ring action.

“We also have the sovereign wealth firms of Qatar Investment Authority, as well as Temasek Holdings out of Singapore. And we have very smart money, US investors in sports like Guggenheim and Chicano. So we have an A-list institutional investor base.

“If someone gives me $500 million, it’s because they’re expecting it to turn into $5 billion. They’re not giving me $500 million because they think it’s going to go to $600 million.”

What is the secret to his success?

“We try to create heroes,” Sityodtong said.

“We build heroes by showcasing their achievements, but we want to tell their stories of overcoming poverty, tragedy, adversity, to inspire our fans. So it’s a very different way of building a fight, of building excitement around our events.

“And of course, the viewership numbers speak for themselves. Nielsen, the world’s largest rating agency, came out with an industry report of the top 20 largest sports properties about a year and a half ago. And we were surprised, actually, that we were bigger than the UFC in terms of viewership numbers on TV or digital and social.

“We knew we were growing very fast, but we had no idea that we were top five.”

ONE Championship has enjoyed stunning growth in social media engagement.

And while ONE has several Australian fighters on its roster, they’ve done little marketing here and have never held a show Down Under.

“I think in the next 12 to 24 months, we’ll have our first on an event in Australia,” Sityodtong said.

Unlike the UFC, ONE’s shows comprise different forms of martial arts, such as Muay Thai and kickboxing that are staged in boxing rings, as well as MMA in cages.

From a Thai village to Harvard Business School, from Wall Street’s Maverick Capital to global domination in the fastest growing market in sport, 52-year-old Sityodtong is not oblivious to the remarkable nature of his story.

“I’m a very grateful person, I live with gratitude,” Sityodtong said.

“But even if I were to complain, what am I going to complain about? I mean, there was a day in my life many years ago where my father abandoned us.

ONE Championship founder Chatri Sityodtong went from Wall Street to fight club.

“I was living on one meal a day. We lost our home, lost our car. I had the Asian culture as the oldest son where I had to take care of my mother and younger brother. Once upon a time I couldn’t even see where I was going to be the next month.

“And today I get to do something so epic like this around the world. When fans come up to me and tell me that they’re inspired by our heroes, or they had some incredible magical memory with their friends and family because of a night we gave like our Denver show in the US, that’s what inspires me.

“There’s no way I cannot not be grateful.”

Originally published as One Championship boss Chatri Sityodtong taking on UFC and the sporting world