Who is the most popular fighter from the UFC?

Ronda Rousey beats Conor McGregor to the number one ranking

Conor McGregor isn’t the most popular UFC figure, it seems. Yes, you read that right.

Popularity can be a hard thing to measure. Just how popular is a fighter in the UFC at any one time? It can be worked out through uptake of PPV or indeed through gate tickets. If that was the case, McGregor would win hands down. However, one of the best ways to measure popularity in today’s age of social media, is in numbers. Numbers of social media followers specifically, after all, it’s the largest area of media consumption in 2017, pretty much so anyway.

We’ve taken the time to trawl through every single UFC fighter in the top 15 P4P Rankings as well as popular figures in recent UFC times, such as Georges St-Pierre, Jon Jones & Rounda Rousey to rank them for popularity. Some of the results may surprise you.

Would you look at that? Ronda Rousey is the most popular figure from the UFC at the moment. Beating McGregor out by around 3 million and some. That’s a surprise to me, so it may be a surprise to you also.

However, it’s clear that McGregor and Rousey, as long suspected are indeed two of the hottest products from the UFC of all time. With their figures beating out even WWE Superstar and UFC retiree, Brock Lesnar by almost 12 million and 15 million fans respectively. Hell, Georges St-Pierre, arguably one of the all time greats of MMA and the UFC lags behind by around 13 million fans behind McGregor and almost 17 million fans behind Rousey.

What does this mean? It doesn’t mean much – unless the fighters use it to leverage better payments from the UFC, to plan any fights in their future or indeed to lure in sponsors. If they don’t – give MMA UK a call, we’re sure we could hook you up with the numbers on your closest competitors…

It does tell us though, that just because you’re ranked number 1 in the Pound for Pound rankings such as Mighty Mouse and are arguably the best fighter – in that particular table – you won’t be the most popular. He ranks 15 out of 19, falling behind the much maligned Welterweight champ, Tyron Woodley. It seems that even in the P4P social media rankings he can’t quite catch a break.

It seems that no matter how many years you put into the sport of MMA, if you don’t put similar thought into developing a personality that people are drawn to, then you may as well forget about big money, red pantie nights and roles in Hollywood movies.

What do you think? Should social media following influence fighter salaries? Is it an accurate measure of a fighters popularity? Let us know!