Fresh from holding its 47th numbered event in Lodz on Saturday March 23, Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki (KSW) has its sights set on breaking the European mixed martial arts market.
Launched in 2004 by Martin Lewandowski and Maciej Kawulski, as it enters its 15th year KSW is the biggest mma promoter in Poland, but its founders have grand ambitions ahead.
In May 2017, the promoter hosted the second-largest MMA event ever with a crowd of 57,766 people, while the fights shown on free-to-air television last year drew an audience of 1.3million.
These remarkable numbers are a long way from KSW’s humble beginnings, with its first promotion held in front of 300 people at the Marriott Hotel in Warsaw where Lewandowski was manager.
At the time, Lewandowski, now 44, had been looking for an alternative sport to football to display for his customers.
He said:
I was looking for a new discipline to bring to Polish people to get them interested in.
I tried with F1, with American football and boxing, I tried with other sports but the reaction to mma was completely different.
I had some fighting experience and background, my first martial arts was kung-fu then kickboxing.Then I started doing mma and realised it was what I wanted to do and wanted to practice. I fell in love with it.
After settling on mma, Lewandowski admitted he had to overcome an image problem with the sport within Poland.
He added:
Poland is a nation that likes fighting and we have a great tradition of fighting. We have great boxers and great fighters, there was a great period for karate and judo.
This all makes this country a lot more receptive to our shows, and as a human being it was about hard work and not letting the failure kill you.
Sixteen years ago, when we started, mma was associated with fighting, with criminals and hooligans and not something you wanted to associate with.
We tried to build the sport and show, because first of all it is a sport with a lot of rules and second it can be entertaining. We really wanted to transform the image of the sport to sell it to the public as a brand new modern concept. Ultimately, now our production value and quality is high and that is what distinguished ourselves from all of our competitors.
The accolades keep on coming; in 2018, KSW was named ’Sports Organisation of the Year’ at the annual Sport Business Gala in Warsaw.
Having hosted its first event outside Poland at Wembley in 2015, KSW returned there in October 2018 while also making its debut in Dublin last year.
Following the success of those promotions, Lewandowski is excited about the expansion potential for KSW within the UK and across Europe.
He said:
I am sure we will be back in England later this year and expansion is one of the key goals in our strategy.
I am also looking to open in new markets, in the Balkans, in Germany, it’s a good market for us where we are very well known and people are big fans.
In terms of developing KSW we are definitely going to go outside of Poland.
We want to grow a bigger fan base and we know people want to see more of KSW wherever they can.
In order to bring new audiences into the sport, KSW have developed a policy of signing fighters from backgrounds outside of mma.
At KSW 47, three Olympic medallists were featured on the card. Satoshi Ishii won judo gold, Damian Janikowski claimed a bronze in wrestling and Szymon Kolecki won weightlifting at Beijing 2008.
The company recently signed up British bodybuilder and social media personality Martyn Ford, with a plan for him to fight later this year, potentially in Britain.
Lewandowski believes this approach is vital to retain relevance of the sport, and also praised the commitment of those coming into the sport.
I think it is important to attract new fans and new people who are interested.
These people came to watch the celebrities fight but they stayed for the mma and really enjoy the whole sport now.
These guys when they decide to do it, they don’t decide within an hour, they are thinking for even half a year so they are already within the mma community so they know what they are doing.
It’s a really serious decision for them, this is what I am saying to people who laugh, when they fight there is love, they might lose teeth, they might break a leg, these guys want to hurt each other.
Fair play to them, it is easy for people to laugh about it. These guys are serious and it is a really serious commitment for them, they don’t want to bring shame on themselves.
