Demian Maia Believes He Could Sell Better Than Stephen Thompson
Demian Maia has gone 9-2 in the UFC after he made the decision to move down from middleweight to welterweight back in 2012. He is currently riding a six fight win streak and holds wins over names such as Gunnar Nelson, Matt Brown, and Carlos Condit. Due to his recent success, both fighters and fans believe that Maia is clearly the number one contender in the welterweight division.
However, the UFC and UFC President Dana White doesn’t think Maia is a draw despite his finishing abilities. The much-coveted shot at the belt has seemingly eluded him for a while now. Maia recently appeared on The MMA Hour (via MMA Fighting) to discuss this topic, and according to Maia, he feels a good handful of people are still doubtful about his ability to sell fights.
“Everybody says, ‘oh this guy sell fights, this other guy doesn’t sell fights,’” Maia said. “But the reality is that in the welterweight division nobody sells fights well. Sometimes people push off my shoulders with these things, but in my last fight, I got a submission win, and in previous fights, I’ve had great performances and people want to watch my fights.”
“I’m not saying that their last fight [Woodley vs. Thompson] was bad, but everybody knew it didn’t sell well, it wasn’t so exciting. So it’s not just my problem, it’s all of us together. The UFC needs to promote a little bit more, and welterweight is a division that is hard to sell nowadays and that’s it,” he continued. “I think that people believe in lies and they repeat the lies so many times that the people start to believe, ‘ah, Demian is not fighting for the title because he doesn’t sell.’ And that’s not true, I wouldn’t sell worse than ‘Wonderboy’ Thompson did, I think I could sell better.”
Maia stated the was puzzled about the decision to make a rematch between Tyron Woodley and Stephen Thompson for UFC 209 due to him thinking that the first fight was already “really boring” due to the lack of action in the first three rounds.
“Marketing is everything. When I watched the first fight between Woodley and Thompson, and I want to make clear that I really admire both guys, for me the fight was really boring at UFC 205 because nobody pulled the trigger for three rounds. The fourth round there was a scramble and that was really exciting, but then the fifth round was so-so again. But in order to make the second fight, the UFC gave them Fight of the Night because after two or three weeks nobody would remember well and then the people would say, ‘okay, it was a nice fight because it was Fight of the Night,’” Maia said. “But for me, that was far [from being] Fight of the Night. So people start to talk about that and that makes a buzz for the next fight, so it’s not so hard. When you want to push somebody, you can do it.”
Maia is scheduled to fight Jorge Masvidal at UFC 211 on May 13th in Dallas, Texas at the American Airlines Arena. You can watch the interview here:
