Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports MMA is reporting that Zuffa has filed a lawsuit against MMA agent Ken Pavia and Bellator Fighting Championship alleging the theft of trade secrets. According to the suit, filed Wednesday in Clark County District Court, Pavia delivered confidential contracts, including fighter agreements, to Bellator after being asked to do so [...]

UK-based sports programming distributor RDA TV has reportedly sold a host of new MMA programming content to television networks in France, Turkey, and the Ukraine. The company has recently licensed UFC programming to ESPN Classic for France, Digiturk in Turkey and QTV in Ukraine. RDA TV previously licensed UFC programming to ESPN for the U.K., [...]

Yesterday, it was officially announced that K-Swiss has purchased FORM Athletics from founder and CEO, Mark Miller. California Sports Company K-Swiss (Nasdaq: KSWS) announced today the acquisition of Laguna Beach-based FORM Athletics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. FORM Athletics will operate as a division of K-Swiss led by Mark Miller, FORM’s incumbent founder [...]

John Ourand of the Sports Business Daily is reporting that Versus will experiment with the use of split-screen commercial breaks in its broadcast of UFC on Versus 2 this Sunday. Versus will run “five or six” of its commercial breaks in a split-screen format next to its live coverage of Sunday’s UFC2 on Versus at [...]

Nutritional supplement company MusclePharm has announced the signing of an exclusive distribution deal with PSI Distribution in Australia and New Zealand worth an estimated $2 million. “Securing an exclusive partnership with PSI in the Australian market is a strategic move in taking advantage of the exposure the UFC partnership has created for MusclePharm,” MusclePharm Executive [...]

Yesterday, HDNet and the Maximum Fighting Championship officially renewed their partnership with a six-event television distribution contract that will take both companies through to the end of 2011. The Maximum Fighting Championship will remain a frontrunner in showcasing live mixed martial arts to a massive international audience with a new six-event contract teamed with broadcast [...]

Damon Martin of MMAWeekly reports on yesterday’s UFC 117 media conference call in which Chael Sonnen tore into Anderson Silva yet again. In one of the most memorable conference calls since Rashad Evans and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson took over the UFC 114 call a few months ago, Sonnen let everyone know how he felt about [...]

MMAFighting and E. Casey Leydon from AllElbows collaborated on a three-part behind-the-scenes series featuring this past weekends title bout participants between Strikeforce 135 lbs champ Sarah Kaufman and #1 contender Roxanne Modafferri. Part 1: Part 2: Part 3: ESPN Features Sarah Kaufman’s Slam as the #4 “Top 10 Play of the Weekend”: MMAPayout Perspective: As [...]

The Staff at MMAJunkie are reporting that Strikeforce Challengers 9 drew 197,000 viewers on Friday, July 23, but peaked at 254,000 for the night’s co-main event between Sarah Kaufman and Roxanne Modafferi. Ratings for this past weekend’s Showtime-televised Strikeforce Challengers 9 event proved solid as the show averaged an audience of 197,000 viewers, an industry [...]

This week’s Sports Business Journal uses its industry spotlight feature to profile the UFC’s new Director of Canadian Operations, Tom Wright. In trying to secure regulation and sanctioning in Canada, is there an order of provinces or some provinces that are top priority? No. 1 would be Ontario, where Toronto is located. We are working [...]