GLORY CEO Jon J. Franklin has unveiled some of the upcoming plans for 2018 in an interview with MMA Plus.
Franklin states that the kickboxing organization aims to do around 14 to 15 events in 2018 and hopes to hold events Brazil and Canada, while also keep coming back to the same places GLORY has been coming in recent years.
“We’re trying to establish a tradition in each city. In New York, we’re doing better and better every time we go back. In Chicago, our ticket sales were up 60 percent show-to-show.
“When we go back to the same city, we don’t have to re-establish, repromote, people know who we are and become acquainted with our fighters. They love to see us come back, so we’re trying to go back to cities time and time again to build a brand in these major markets around the world,” Franklin says.
“We’re trying to do two things. One: we’re going back to the major markets where we’re accepted, sell a lot of tickets and have a lot of fans, and we’re trying to break into some new markets.
“Brazil, for sure, we wanna go there. We’ve got a lot of fighters there. We got great TV contracts in Brazil. As we sit here right now, we’re on Esportivo, Globo and the Combate channel. We gonna do a live event there.
“We wanna go to Canada. We wanna go to Toronto, a huge fight city. Other promotions have done really well there. But as their rules are set, they don’t allow our style of kickboxing. So we’ve got a major effort to have our rules accepted by a sports ministry in Ontario. And of course, we went to China for the first time.
“So Brazil, China, and Canada are all places you’ll see GLORY going, hopefully in 2018.”
If those plans include Badr Hari is unclear for now. Dutch Outlet AD stated in July that ‘Team Hari’ is in negotiations with GLORY about a two-year contract.
Franklin expects to have an update on the situation in the near future: “We’re talking to Badr and we’ll make some announcements shortly. We have to get some things signed.
“Obviously, we’d love to have Badr Hari in GLORY and we’d like to have him do some normal fights and schedule Collision 2 again. That’s unfinished business for both guys. That’s definitely something we’re working on really hard (to) bring that fight to the fans.”
