Yahoo: WEC announces its move to pay-per-view with Aldo vs. Faber

[Clark Kent]

02-03-2010 05:21 PM:

After much discussion, World Extreme Cagefighting has announced its plans to jump into the pay-per-vew pool. The first PPV will air on April 24, headlined by Jose Aldo's first title defense against Urijah Faber. This will go down in Faber's hometown of Sacramento in one of the WEC's favorite venues, the Arco Arena.

Donald Cerrone and Ben Henderson also will fight -- a rematch of their much-disputed October bout -- and Manny Gamburyan will face Mike Brown.

“We wanted to wait until we had this type of card to go to pay-per-view,” WEC general manager Reed Harris told the AP. “We didn’t want to do a pay-per-view show until fans would say at the end of the night, ‘This was worth it.’ This will truly be the biggest event we’ve ever done.”

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There is questioning the strength of the card -- it has two title fights and a total of four champions or former champions fighting -- but the price of $44.95 is a bit tough to swallow. The WEC has given out its product for (sort of) free on basic cable for years. Jumping from $0 to $44.95 might be difficult for the biggest of fans.

Not only that, it falls right between a six-week stretch with three UFC pay-per-views. All three cards have title fights: 111 with GSP vs. Dan Hardy, 112 with Anderson Silva vs. Vitor Belfort, and 113, with a rematch between Lyoto Machida and Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. It will cost MMA fans roughly $180 to buy all four cards. It's not that the WEC card isn't worth the money -- it is -- but will the fans have the cash to make these fights a success?



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Cagewriter is an MMA blog edited by Steve Cofield.