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#4. ONE ranks among top global sports properties in online viewership and engagement
2020 and 2021 were huge years for ONE Championship as far as online presence is concerned.
According to a June 2021 report released by Nielsen sports, ONE ranks among the top-10 global sports properties in engaging fans online. Despite the pandemic, ONE also ranks in the top 10 in broadcast hours and is considered to be the fastest-growing company for followers across major social media platforms.
In 2021, ONE Championship broke new ground by becoming the No. 1 sports property in Facebook Organic Views, beating its closest competitor by a whopping one billion hits. The most significant aspect of this milestone is that ONE's biggest sport competition, the UFC, fell behind in fifth place with just 1.65 billion hits.
Facebook, by and large, is the top social media platform in the world, with its users taking up more than a third of the globe's total population. If ONE rules the organic views of any sport on this platform, we can safely say that the Asian organization is one of the most viewed sports leagues on the planet.
Some organizations haven't reached this feat in many decades, but ONE Championship did so in less than one.
#3. The historic Johnson-Askren trade - the first major trade in MMA history
Trades between teams are common in major sports. The NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB trade players all the time. Not to mention draft picks.
This practice has never existed in MMA, mostly because the UFC seemingly wanted to establish itself as the major league in the sport and separate itself from the pack. Because of this, their fighters tend to be on exclusive contracts, a practice that was soon followed by major MMA promotions around the world.
In November of 2018, however, an unprecedented trade took place between the UFC and ONE Championship. This was during a time when the UFC was just sold for $4 billion to WME-IMG and was at the very peak of sports. They don't even mention the names of other organizations in their broadcasts, except for PRIDE FC and Strikeforce, which they have bought out in the past.
Imagine the surprise of the MMA world when supposedly rival organizations, the UFC and ONE Championship, made a deal to trade UFC flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson for ONE welterweight champion Ben Askren.
While we are not completely educated about the legal procedures that happened behind the curtain, this trade was definitely a brave move for both companies. Johnson was on a historic run in his division, while the then-undefeated Askren was largely considered the best champion outside the UFC.
The trade was big in and of itself, but the subsequent events that followed it led to ONE Championship becoming a major force in the fight business. While Askren had a less-than-perfect run in the UFC, Johnson was predicted to run through the entire ONE flyweight division. The man has records in the UFC you'd only see in the career mode of UFC 4.
No one saw how Johnson's journey into ONE Championship would be a rough one, however. After getting challenged on all fronts by Yuya Wakamatsu on his debut, Johnson compiled two more wins to get a crack at champion Adriano Moraes.
In the most shocking moment of 2021, Moraes, with pretty much everyone thinking he'd lose, knocked out the MMA GOAT contender.
This stunning win brought ONE Championship to the head of the table and has proven that the Asian organization has some of the best fighters in the world. The fact that one of the greatest UFC champions of all time got knocked out by one of ONE's champions proved this fact resoundingly.
