Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) wants to take over the world of mixed martial arts (MMA).
While the Las Vegas-based fight promotion already has a stranglehold on the stateside market, it's slowly but surely extended its grip Internationally, holding recent events in Canada, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia and even China.
Next stop? India, South Africa and Mexico.
But no quest for global domination would be complete without advancing on Mother Russia, which not only holds a certain legacy in pop culture (think Rocky IV), it also happened to produce one of the finest combatants in all of combat sports.
While "The Last Emperor" is already behind the iron curtain for good, hanging up his shoes last year in front of a hometown crowd, the Soviet fight scene is still bustling thanks to its Sambo submission tournaments and recent Octagon imports like Khabib Nurmagomedov.
UFC President Dana White told the Scrumbags he wants a piece of that pie as early as this year:
"We're working on Russia right now. I would say this year. I think what's going to go on in Russia is we'll put on a live event there first. We'll do a live event in Russia, and just like every other event we've done, you do the live event and it explodes. Mixed martial arts is already big over there. Sambo is big over there. We'll see where the market goes from there."
Click here to see his entire conversation (starting at 22:25).
At 36, Emelianenko is hardly over the hill, but the chances of him ever stepping foot inside a UFC branded cage are about as likely as Nostradumass winning a Pulitzer Prize for his fight picks, thanks to the ugly history between ZUFFA and M-1, the promotion in charge of telling the Stary Oskol-native what to do.
And I'm sure they would tell him to avoid any Russian UFC event like the plague. Still, imagine the buzz if the cameras flipped over to Fedor sitting cageside on fight night?
Fanboy frenzy!
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