REBEL Fighting Championship adds ‘top guns’ to its fold

SOUTHEAST Asia-based mixed martial arts promotion REBEL Fighting Championship fortified further its organization by adding accomplished individuals to key positions.

In an announcement, REBEL FC, a dynamic fightainment company, said Vivian Xia and Ophelia Yao are now part of its group and will play key roles as the company continues with its push of bringing to the fore the promotion’s brand of mixed martial arts action.

The two will be deeply involved, among other things, in REBEL FC’s vision of having a full-fledged MMA reality show in China.

Ms. Xia joins REBEL FC as sponsorship director. She spent most of her career from 1999 to 2018 — 16 years — at The Nielsen Company, a global marketing research firm headquartered in New York.

With Nielsen she helped build up a sports and entertainment department for the company from 2016 to 2018 as associate director. The new department is responsible for the business and product developments of the sports industry in China.

From 2018, Ms. Xia went on to join OCEANS Sports & Entertainment Inc. as its vice-president. OCEANS is one of the leading sports marketing agencies in China specializing in integrated sports marketing, event organization and promotion, sponsorship development, and building relevant relationships across China’s fast-growing sports industry.

Ms. Yao, meanwhile, is now REBEL FC’s sponsorship manager. She has experience from IMG, a global events and talent management company headquartered in New York,under Endeavor Group Holdings. Endeavor is best known for acquiring UFC in 2016 for $4 billion.

At IMG, Ms. Yao was Sales Support & Client Servicing Manager at IMG Golf Asia, focusing on client relations and servicing for the WGC-HSBC Champions project, building corporate partnerships with Mercedes Benz, WeChat, Dell and TutorABC.

“It is an honor for me and Ophelia to be a witness and participant in innovative sports marketing with REBEL FC’s planned reality show. I think it is an exciting platform to communicate MMA as a professional sport in the language of mass entertainment that will resonate with the mass audience in China. The attributes of MMA conveyed through the reality show can encourage positive thinking and enterprising fighting spirit as well as revitalising national pride in everyone in China,” said Ms. Xia.

REBEL FC was founded in 2013 and has steadily made a name for itself in the MMA scene.

Filipino fighters have been competing in the promotion, among them lightweight fighters Jaypee Espinosa and Reydon Romero, who saw action at “REBEL FC 9: Return of the Champion” in Shanghai in September. — Michael Angelo S. Murillo