In 2021, Italian MMA hopes to see some much-desired light after
several dark months.
The first Italian promotion to break the ice in the new year will
be The
Golden Cage, which will hold its
third event on Feb. 6. The event will go down behind closed
doors at the Heaven Fight Arena, the home of the Aurora MMA team,
and it will be headlined by a welterweight championship clash
between Leonardo
Damiani and Marco
Saccaro.
Sherdog spoke with the two minds behind the upcoming Golden Cage
event. The first was Luigi Perillo, the founder of Icon Holding. He
recollected that his adventure with MMA started after watching UFC
1 on videotape, instantly falling in love with the sport. Over the
years, his passion for MMA grew into a business opportunity called
The Golden Cage.
“The Golden Cage is a concept that I developed with two of my
former business partners,” Perillo said. “We took the idea of a
traditional MMA card and added some musical interludes. The final
result was a sort of Cirque du Soleil-esque event where there were
no dead moments, and the public’s attention was high. The general
audience welcomed this format, but many insiders and hardcore fans
criticized it. We aimed to bring new people to MMA using different
ways of entertainment. Do you know what’s funny? Now I see big MMA
brands doing the same thing, inviting rappers, influencers,
celebrities to increase the public.”
The Golden Cage appeared to be an excellent opportunity to enlarge
the scope of mixed martial arts in Italy. In the past, some of the
country’s more famous rappers took the stage to perform. While its
sophomore event fell short of selling out the 4,000-seat arena, it
delivered a card that rivaled 2016’s Venator FC 3, which is
considered the quintessential Italian MMA production.
“As a Fortune 500 businessman, I dealt with the upper segment of
finance managing some large corporations, including Tandy Corp.,
RadioShack, Hitachi,” The Golden Cage co-promoter Steve Dapper
said. “I come from a highly speculative business world. When Luigi
talked to me about his idea, I thought it needed some structure to
be more relevant in an international setting. He showed me numbers
and things I needed to know for me to develop a strategy, which
grew up a series of initiatives that, from time to time, we started
putting forward to achieve our goals. I wasn’t into MMA at all at
first. I needed to learn how it worked, its politics, the dirt in
it, and all of those crappy things that make up every business.
There’s no difference between MMA and any other business. When
there’s money involved, there are interests.”
One of the essential steps in Perillo’s career was taking a break
to focus on politics.
“After the second card, I applied to join the International MMA
Federation,” Perillo added. “I saw that there was an opportunity to
create an official MMA Federation in Switzerland, and I took it.
Steve and I went to Bahrein and joined the IMMAF, funding the brand
new MMASF. In the remaining of the time, I worked to build some
relationships with many national IMMAF sections, including FIGMMA,
the Italian one. We don’t want to take over anyone, but to work
together to achieve big things with half the effort.”
The official recognition came in no time, and Perillo became the
MMASF president, with Dapper serving as vice president.
“All the federations in the sporting world are in Switzerland. If
you want to do something with international relevance, you have to
do it here,” Dapper explained. “We saw the opportunity, and we
built up the federation, signing with more than 200 gyms. You need
to have the territory, critical mass, but you also need to provide
a service. This service is what MMASF does with the amateur under
IMMAF. The institution was keen on accepting us as a federation. We
managed to do so in a short time for our merits alone. I say this
because we worked hard, and they understood that we are serious
people.”
In addition to promoting events and heading a sanctioning body,
Perillo and Dapper manage a stable of fighters through Superbia
Management. Given that there is no official European law that
forbids this conflict of interest, it is fairly standard that a
manager maintains a promotion where they can exhibit their
fighters. Other such European organizations with similar
arrangements include Cage Warriors Fighting Championship and
Intensiti Fighter Management, or Ares Fighting Championship and MMA Factory.
“We help our athletes with everything and follow them on a fiscal
level, a psychological and a financial one,” Perillo added. “We pay
for their maintenance, their rent, groceries, and we send them
abroad for their camps. Over the years, we signed some deals with
the best teams in the world. We have an apartment at the SBG
Ireland headquarters. When our athletes go there, they have just to
think about training and improving, and the same goes for our
structures in Sacramento and Los Angeles. We don’t talk. We make
facts.”
2020 was a year that saw one of the more important victories in
Italian MMA history, when Marvin
Vettori upended Jack
Hermansson at UFC on ESPN 19. Unlike Vettori, many other
Italian athletes struggled to deliver good results throughout major
MMA promotions. For example, Mara
Romero Borella was cut from the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Alessio
Di Chirico is currently riding a three-bout skid and Alen
Amedovski has yet to score his first victory under the
Nevada-based promotion’s banner. During the recent Bellator MMA events in Milan, the local fighters
notched only two wins amidst seven losses. The situation gets even
worse for Italian prospects when looking at the regional European
scene.
“I said this with the utmost respect, but Italian fighters are
being made fun of. They are used as lambs for slaughter by big
international organizations,” Dapper said matter-of-factly. “That’s
enough. Why is this happening? It’s not because Italian MMA can’t
produce talent, but because they don’t know how to value
themselves. They don’t know how to talk the business talk. I am
Italian, so if I talk bad about Italians, I do that to myself. It’s
time to work hard and value ourselves. It’s been 20 years that
everyone tries to make value out of this country, but no one
succeeded. How come? We managed to do in six months what others
couldn’t do in 20 years. There has to be a reason, right?”
In their attempt to help Italian MMA reach new levels, Dapper and
Perillo will promote their events on every television channel,
including those popular among younger audiences. That’s where
“Chill House” comes in handy, a common house they created filled
with Italian influencers. Those influences will live together, and
among other things, will have the chance to train MMA inside the
house.
“Should we rely only on Italian hardcore fans, we wouldn’t have
enough money to buy a pizza,” Dapper continued. “We are aiming for
the mass market. After surveying with Italian and Swiss agencies,
we discovered that most MMA fans in this country have between 15
and 24 years. Chill House is a real house in Milan with a gym, an
MMA cage, and professional MMA coaches who will train every day the
ten most known Italian TikTokers and influencers. They are going to
show their followers what MMA is really about since many people
have many preconceptions about the nature of this beautiful sport.
We are talking about 40 million followers and an engagement rate of
more than 63 percent. We bet that their followers will first
subscribe to UFC Fight Pass, purchasing the member pass, and then
they will come to our events, when it will be possible.”
Even though The Golden Cage has only held a small number of events,
some promising up-and-coming MMA talents across Italy have already
appeared. If the current global pandemic allows it, Perillo and
Dapper plan to have 10 to 12 events per year across Italy,
Switzerland and Malta.
“The first ones will be behind closed doors,” revealed Perillo. “We
already secured some locations that fit our needs. We have three
IMMAF-certified cages. All the athletes will be tested thanks to
our working team, who has already been trained for the task. We are
going to do radical work concerning matchmaking in Italy. We want
to show our best talents and to give a chance to all the athletes
who deserved it. They deserve some visibility! When the chance
comes, you have to take it.”
Recently, UFC Fight Pass announced that The Golden Cage would be
joining its library, where future events will be aired live on the
service. The upcoming Golden Cage card will feature multiple
fighters out of Aurora MMA, as the event is going down in their
gym. Besides the main attraction of Damiani-Saccaro, the show will
feature UFC and Bellator alum Danilo
Belluardo, who will face off against Dragan
Pesic at lightweight.
“It’s been a long and complex negotiation, but we are the first
Italian promotion to air on the Fight Pass,” Dapper proclaimed.
“This contract is a part of a bigger agreement that I can’t reveal
right now. I can tell you that we have a multi-year and multi-event
contract. It’s a rich schedule with events for every month of the
year. We have total creative control over those events, and there
might be other sports included, not just MMA. We can bring all the
combat sports we want, provided that they have some characteristic
of production, quality and audience.”