Sunday, August 28, 2011

Why the Marloes Coenen signing could backfire on Blackeye Promotions

So former Strikeforce champ Marloes Coenen announced on Friday that she signed a three fight contract with Blackeye Promotions. Blackeye is a fledgling promotion in North Carolina. They have done one show and have another coming up on Oct. 1. They tend to have more women's matches on their shows but they have men on them too. Apparently Marloes will make an appearance on the Oct. 1 show and then fight for them in Feb. 2012. This is actually Blackeye's first major contract signing. But is it a real contract? A contract was signed but it's not an exclusive contract. So let's look at a plausible scenario that could affect a non-exclusive contract. You probably know by now that Zuffa is in talks with Golden Glory to sign former Strikeforce heavyweight champ Alistair Overeem. Knowing how Golden Glory operates, they will no doubt attempt to tie in the Overeem negotiations with the re-hiring of Marloes along with Jon Olav Einemo. It's certainly a possibility that Zuffa could go along with that to speed up negotiations because they would like to have Overeem in a UFC cage before the end of the year. So what happens to Blackeye's non-exclusive contract if Marloes returns to Strikeforce? Obviously Zuffa would insist that she not fulfill the contract because Zuffa's contracts are exclusive. I don't know if that will happen but if it does, Marloes won't fight for Blackeye despite Friday's announcement. Maybe they should have waited until the Golden Glory negotiations concluded. Because right now the announcement seems more like a publicity stunt than something that will happen. Without exclusivity, the contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

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