Cage Contender and OMMAC join up for 8 man tournament

In an interesting move two of Europe’s most successful promoters Chris Zorba and John Ferguson have agreed a joint venture that will see them bring a new televised MMA show to the UK.

Cage Contender – The Fight Stars Tournament an 8 man knock out style tournament with a minimum £10,000 prize pool will be held at the 145Lbs featherweight limit in Liverpool, England on 4^th August 2012 and is expected to feature many of the UK top 20 fighters ranked at the weight.

The last man standing style format will see qtr and semi-final bouts held over 2 x 5 min rounds with a 3^rd round should the score cards be level after the first 2. The final will be 3 x 5 min rounds with the winner walking away with a cool £4000 plus sponsors bonuses. While the brand will fall under the Cage Contender banner for television purposes the tournaments will have their own branding and fresh ideas including another dimension to proceedings where fighters will be able to wager each other up to 50% of their purse in feature called “Power Play”

“I am really looking forward to working with Chris and his team. I am pretty sure that we have come up with a product that entertains MMA fans, gives the fighters taking part a chance to shine on the international televised stage and helps them benefit from the publicity that comes along with it. We are not reinventing the wheel here, just putting new tyres on it with some quirky features that will make it a little bit more exciting for everybody” – John Ferguson

In addition to the main tournament there will be a full undercard and discussions are still on going in regard to possibly unifying a Cage Contender and OMMAC title on the night

“ Ive been toying with the idea of a tournament for a while but wanted it done properly. John has done great things with the Cage Contender brand in the last 24 months and between us we will deliver an awesome event. The featherweight division in the UK is very exciting and the winner of this tournament will be catapulted into the bigtime” Chris Zorba

It is not often we see promoters pair up like this but in this case it seems to make sense. Veteran promoter Zorba brings a wealth of experience to the venture, he has been the man behind many well know UK promotions such as Cage Gladiators, Fight Stars and OMMAC and is seen by many as the leading promoter of UK MMA talent. John Ferguson is the man who appeared from outside the industry just over two years ago and very quickly built up his Cage Contender brand to dominate the Irish MMA market and have television deals in close to 100 countries worldwide, in 2011 Cage Contender had the largest broadcast footprint in European MMA.

Fighters and card details are expected to entering the public domain in the next few months ahead of the event in the Liverpool Olympia on August 4th

TheFightLounge