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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
The WEC has officially announced their first move to pay-per-view for their WEC 48 event, which will be headlined by a double main event with two major Title fights. In the top slot, Featherweight Champion Jose Aldo will defend his Title against former Champion Urijah Faber, while Benson Henderson will face off with Donald Cerrone for the second time, this time for the Undisputed WEC Lightweight Championship.
The event will take place on April 24th, not in May as was originally believed, and will be priced at $44.99 for the pay-per-view. The event will take place out of one of the WEC's homebase locations, Sacramento, California's Arco Arena. In addition to the two Title fights, former Featherweight Champion Mike Brown will also be on the card in a fight against former Ultimate Fighter contestant and UFC fighter Manvel Gamburyen.
The move is a gamble for the organization, who will for the first time be charging MMA fans to see one of their events. Said WEC General Manager Reed Harris to the Associated Press, "We wanted to wait until we had this type of card to go to pay-per-view. 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."
Penick's Analysis: The date change to April was a great one, though the price for the event still bothers me. When they have no history on pay-per-view and their numbers on Versus have only hit a certain level, it's going to be a tough task to pull an extra $45 out of fans' pockets with a UFC pay-per-view earlier in the month, featuring two Title fights of its own by the way, and everything in May that has already been discussed. I'm very curious to see how this pans out for the WEC, as it is going to be a very good card and will be by far the biggest event they've put on, but with so much on the pay-per-view landscape I just can't see this doing a great number on pay-per-view. I hope they prove me wrong, and I hope they can succeed with this, I just don't believe that's going to happen at this point. But, if ever they had a card worthy of charging fans to see, this is the one to go with, no doubt.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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