This is the 1st installment in a series of snapshots taken from the analyses of what is likely the only ever census of MMA fights (enuMMA17). We will keep this table of contents up to date as we add installments.
toc: Table of Contents
- The Great MMA Census of 2017.
- MMA Industry Historical Growth Trends.
- Promotions a Historical Perspective.
- If You Can't Beat Them, Buy Them.
- Pay-Per-View Only Part of the Picture.
- Trends in Total Results.
- Results by Weight Class.
- And the King of Subs is...
- Submissions by Target.
- Fight Names.
- Fight by Country.
The Dataset
In February of 2018 we set our polite (see aside) spiders loose. They crawled the web looking for data relating to professional MMA fights. What they returned was a census of professional MMA. After cleaning the data:
Polite Spiders
Our crawlers are built using Scrapy & Beautiful Soup. Scrapy's default settings are to obey robots.txt files. In addition we insert an email contact address into the bots header in case the property owners have any questions.
- removed duplicates,
- removed amateur fights / fighters,
- trimmed fights:
- before 1993 (the full data set starts in 1984) &
- after 2017
we where left with:
tbl 01: Data Counts
| Variable | Count |
|---|---|
| Fights | 229 892 |
| Fighters | 111 932 |
| Events | 38 574 |
| Promotions | 16 711 |
Since we acquired the data in order to analyse it... We started plotting some plots. Since fights are the fundamental unit of MMA that seemed the logical place to start.
fig 01: Total Fights per Year (1993 - 2017)
2013 was the peak of MMA fights per year.
Not exactly what we where expecting. After all we constantly hear about how "MMA is the fastest growing sport in the world". So whats going on? In our next snapshot we will take a deeper look into the historical growth trends of the MMA industry.