It’s been a huge year for Cage Warriors.
The promotion, who recently signed a television deal with Channel 4 in the UK, will take another big step forward on Saturday June 7 when they present a mammoth all-day Mixed Martial Arts event from The Forum in London, England.
Cage Warriors CEO Graham Boylan is thrilled that the event has finally come to fruition.
“UK MMA doesn’t have a yearly annual event like this. It’s going to be a great day and a great weekend for the sport.
“If you’re an MMA fan from the UK, or even in Europe, you’d be nuts not to come to Super Saturday!”
Inspired by other sports, Graham and the Cage Warriors team set out to create a marquee yearly event which would be Mixed Martial Arts’ equivalent of the Champions League final or the Super Bowl.
Explaining the thinking behind the event, Graham said: “I watch a lot of sport and we had three shows in March, we were travelling a lot, and I got caught up in ‘March Madness’. It made me think, ‘What has MMA got on a yearly basis that’s consistent?’
“We thought about and said, ‘Let’s give them a Super Saturday’, a marathon day of MMA. We’ll bring out every major gun we have on the roster. We’ll have the event, seminars, the Super Saturday launch, and run some things on the Sunday to make it a huge event for the MMA fan.”
The all-day event – Cage Warriors’ eighth in 2014 – will present unaired and Facebook streamed preliminary fights from 3pm, before two, six-fight main cards, both of which will conclude with a world championship fight.
The first, featuring a main event of Jack Hermansson vs. Norman Paraisy to crown a new CWFC Middleweight Champion, will start at 6pm.
The second main card, headlined by the anticipated rematch between Stevie Ray and Curt Warburton for the vacant CWFC Lightweight Championship, will commence at 9pm.
“It’s great,” said Graham. “It’s a great story to get the two new champions crowned before we break for the summer.”
The seminars run alongside the event will feature various fighters and coaches, with special guest Jens Pulver running a guest seminar, plus a screening of Pulver’s documentary movie Driven on the Friday night.
Cage Warriors 69: Super Saturday will also be the first event to implement increased fines for fighters who miss weight.
In the past, a fighter weighing over the contracted limit by 2.2lbs or less resulted in a 25 per cent fine, and a 40 per cent fine for anything above that, with all the money going to his or her opponent.
However, following a number of fighters missing weight, Graham and the team made the decision to raise fines to 60 per cent, regardless of how much a fighter misses weight by. 40 per cent of that money will go to their opponent and 20 per cent to a charity of their opponent’s choosing.
Graham hopes that it will act as an incentive for his fighters, as well as improving the safety of those on the roster.
“Missing weight is not good enough as a professional athlete. If you want to take this seriously and make a name for yourself in this sport then you’ve got to be making that weight.
“If someone chooses not to make the weight and disrespect their opponent, disrespect themselves and disrespect the organisation and the contract that they signed, then the money goes to their opponent and to charity. Cage Warriors doesn’t keep any of it.
“If they make weight, no-one loses a penny. It also comes down to the fact that some guys are fighting in a weight division they shouldn’t be fighting in. They’re cutting too much weight. It’s a safety thing because if you’re cutting that much weight, you shouldn’t be fighting in that division. It’s too dangerous.”
Graham took over as CEO of Cage Warriors in August 2010 and says the promotion has gone from strength-to-strength in his time at the helm.
“When you think about where Cage Warriors was three years ago, it’s now live in 150 million homes across the world and we’re doing 18 live broadcasted shows each year.
“Cage Warriors, in my eyes, is the biggest promotion outside of the U.S. There’s not another promotion doing this many live shows per year, in countries where the UFC hasn’t even been to.
“I’d say we’re the second biggest MMA organisation in the world right now.”
Super Saturday is the next big step in Cage Warriors’ journey
Graham added: “If you’re an MMA fan and you like fights, there’s going to be twenty-plus of them on Super Saturday. It’s the biggest European names, all on one stacked card.
“You don’t want to be an MMA fan and miss something like that!”
Tickets are still available for Super Saturday on Ticketmaster. For more information about the event, visit cagewarriors.com.