The State of Kickboxing: Glory’s Slow Crawl to Legitimacy

[K1power]

The State of Kickboxing: Glory’s Slow Crawl to Legitimacy

What does it take to get over with fans? It’s the million dollar question that marks the dividing line between a gimmick of the moment and a product that has established its presence in the market—the continuum, in our case, that Glory finds itself inching along in its slow crawl to stability and legitimacy.

There’s an expectation that ‘getting over’ amounts to finding a moment that will make its mark in the minds of fans—in the collective consciousness of the sports entertainment universe—and to seizing the opportunity to rocket the brand into orbit. Creating that moment is something that Glory has pursued relentlessly, putting its highlight-making fighters like Joe Schilling and Raymond Daniels on TV with regular frequency.

For its trouble, the highlights are adding up, and Glory has amassed a fight library that could now fill dead airtime with countless hours of syndicated content (are you listening, SpikeTV?). There’s a sense that Glory’s efforts are adding up to something, but for many fans in the kickboxing community, talk is cheap and there exists a healthy skepticism about Glory’s future. After a very tumultuous 2014, one could be forgiven for continuing to feel let down by Glory, which is why I think it is important to take a step back and reevaluate Glory’s place in the kickboxing world during these last few months.

Read the full article at liverkick.com/index.php/item/3558-the-state-of-kickboxing-glory-s-slow-crawl-to-legitimacy

Interesting read and comments (so far)

[K1power]

Very interesting comment on this article

You said it yourself, Glory has already been to Japan twice and attacked it with solid cards. There's a reason why they haven't been back.

Fundamentally, there's two models for combat sports in Japan. The first is the K-1 model. For that you need to host tentpole shows of 5-50K people in the Tokyo Dome/Yokohama Stadium/Budokan/Yoyogi. You need to get terrestrial broadcasting on a major network and consistently earn +15% ratings (that's 15% of Japanese households, which means tens of millions of viewers). Speaking of which, that's at least 4-6 shows per year you can secure for the networks so they have a year's worth of programming.

That's the scale required to make an impact for a global organization. That's also the scale that Glory tried to attain and failed at. For Glory 13 they brought Tanikawa over cause they thought he could help secure TV broadcasting. They bought adds all over Shibuya proclaiming Aerts was retiring. Guess what, didn't work. Nobody knows what "Glory" is.

The second smaller model, which seems to be what you're suggesting is flawed in two ways. First of all, setting up shows with 600-2,000 viewers isn't going to move the needle for Glory. This is especially true since any broadcast will be done on time-delay or live when its early morning in the US. Secondly, if Glory just enters there without scale what distinguishes it from Krush, RISE, Big Bang, NJKF, Hoost Cup, and a thousand other smaller kickboxing orgs? They may not be well known to you, but they consistently have strong shows and have relationships with local talent.

As for 'the specter of K-1', this isn't some phantom threat. I'm talking of how K-1 has come back to Japan, sold out every show its put on, completely neutered Glory's FW division by signing away Kubo and Noiri, contracted most of the major gyms in Japan and rebranded them as "K-1 gyms", restarted the Koshien amateur program and developed a new generation of local stars in Takeru, Urabe brothers, Kimura and the like. What makes you think Glory can compete?