Dana White: UFC 'Aggressively Working On Mexico'

For all of its success in expanding outward into the global market, the UFC has been unable to make things come together in a few key markets. Of the most notable is Mexico, a historically fight-friendly market that the UFC has yet to set up stakes in, though UFC president Dana White revealed today that it's not been for a lack of trying.

"We've been working on Mexico for a long time," the UFC boss said on today's UFC On FOX 1 conference call. "Believe me, Mexico is a very important market for us. If you remember, when we first started this thing, the three no-brainers for me were the Unites States, Mexico and the UK. Mexico's taking a little longer than we planned, but we're aggressively working on Mexico."

Having pushed into Brazil this year with great success and with plans to hold a show in Japan in early 2012, the UFC appear to be having plenty of success expanding into other markets. Despite appearances, White says that moving into foreign markets is always difficult and made more so by the promotion's unwillingness to partner with just anyone.

"It's tough. Getting out there and maneuvering in other countries isn't easy," he said. "For this fight on Fox, we've got sixteen countries taking this fight live. We have to do business with all these different countries, from Brazil to China, to here to there - it's tough to maneuver and get things done. I think we've been incredibly successful. Look at it this way, we just got on television in America in 2006. And now we're in all of these other countries - not just on some pan-regional sports network, on major, major networks in all these different countries. And that's what our goal is: we don't just want to roll into these countries on some goofy network somewhere, we wanna be on the real deal."

Mark Wayne is the head writer for FightLine.com. He can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/_MarkWayne.