PRIDE FC
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| Private | |
| Industry | Mixed martial arts promotion |
| Fate | Merged with Ultimate Fighting Championship |
| Successor | Ultimate Fighting Championship |
| Founded | Tokyo, Japan October 11, 1997 |
| Defunct | October 4, 2007 |
| Headquarters | Tokyo, Japan |
| Owner | WME-IMG |
| Website | http://www.pridefc.com/ |
Pride Fighting Championships (Pride or Pride FC, founded as KRS-Pride) was a Japanese mixed martial arts (MMA) organization founded by Nobuyuki Sakakibara and Nobuhiko Takada. Its inaugural event was held at the Tokyo Dome on October 11, 1997. Pride held more than sixty mixed martial arts events, broadcast to about 40 countries worldwide. Pride held the largest live MMA event audience record of 91,107 people at the Pride and K-1 co-production, Shockwave/Dynamite, held in August 2002, as well as the audience record of over 67,450 people at the Pride Final Conflict 2003. For ten years PRIDE was one of the most popular MMA organizations in the world.
In March 2007, Dream Stage Entertainment (DSE) sold Pride to Lorenzo Fertitta and Frank Fertitta III, co-owners of Zuffa, which owns the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). While remaining as legally separate entities with separate managements, the two promotions were set to cooperate in a manner akin to the AFL-NFL merger. However, such an arrangement did not materialize, and in October 2007, Pride Worldwide's Japanese staff was laid off, marking the end of the organization as an active fight promoter. As a result, many of the Pride staff left to form a new organization alongside K-1 parent company Fighting and Entertainment Group. That new organization, founded in February 2008, was named Dream.
In 2015, Pride's co-founder and former president Nobuyuki Sakakibara established Rizin Fighting Federation in Japan with the same philosophy and ambition as for the defunct Pride organization.
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