The story behind Friday night’s event pitting fighters from RFA against fighters from Legacy FC is one that tells you a lot about why we don’t see co-promotional events like this very often.

In fact, we hardly ever see them in MMA, which is weird because we seem to talk about them an awful lot.

The talk is how all this started, according to Legacy FC owner Mick Maynard. It’s just that it wasn’t Legacy FC or RFA that started it. Instead it was WSOF, which last year proposed a cross-promotional event pitting its organization’s fighters against Bellator MMA’s, complete with a spreadsheet spelling out the match-ups.

Bellator didn’t exactly jump at the offer, but Legacy FC’s Maynard liked the idea. He even offered up his promotion, he said, if WSOF was really looking to match its fighters against someone else’s.

“But the truth is,” Maynard told MMAjunkie, “when you sit down and try to figure it out from a financial standpoint, an ego standpoint, and an organizational standpoint, it usually is just not realistic at all.”

RFA President Ed Soares had a similar thought when he first heard the co-promotional talk. That’s why he didn’t pay much attention to it initially, he said. It sounded like a ploy for attention by promoters who knew what fans wanted to hear even if they had no intention of delivering.

“When things came up last year with different organizations talking about it, we knew that those organizations would never step up and really do it,” Soares said. “They just wouldn’t, because there’s too many different things, egos and whatever, that’s involved.”

It’s true that co-promotion is a tricky business, with obstacles ranging from practical questions about fighter pay and revenue splits to psychological battles about match-ups and event branding.

These are obstacles that AXS TV Fights CEO Andrew Simon has tried to work around in the past, he said, but when he approached different promoters about the idea “usually they were pretty much just big talkers … and we never could get it to happen.”

“The biggest obstacles typically become an ego thing,” said Simon, whose MMA-centric TV channel also broadcasts events from organizations such as CES MMA, MFC and Lion Fight (muay Thai). “If you’re WSOF or you’re Bellator, and you go up against one of (the organizations on AXS TV) and they go 0-5, are they going to be thrilled with that? With one promotion and one TV network going against another, there’s some ego and some risk involved.”

In addition to that “fear of loss,” Simon said, there are also financial concerns, since, “You have some people signing contracts that maybe aren’t financially viable, so they don’t want their guys to lose.”

One thing that Simon had working in his favor here was the sheer number of MMA events broadcast on AXS TV. While other cable networks typically pick one promotion to partner with, AXS broadcasts several. Pitting two organizations that already air on the same network against each other eliminates at least one of the hurdles. That still leaves you with the problem of finding two fight promoters who can work together, however, which isn’t easy.

Setting aside the ego, Maynard said, “That’s everything. I think that’s the biggest issue to overcome, honestly.”

A lot of it comes down to each promotion’s concept of itself. Some organizations that fans and media would classify as “minor league” absolutely hate that description. Make the mistake of calling them a small-time promoter, and the bombastic leaders of those organizations will jump all over you with boasts about how long they’ve been in business and how many events they’ve promoted in how many different cities.

No one likes to think of themselves as small-time, least of all those people who really are, relatively speaking, pretty small-time.

But one of the things that made RFA different under Soares’ leadership was his open admission that his goal was to become a “developmental league” for major promotions. He’s likened RFA to the college football of MMA, and he takes pride in how many of his fighters go on to sign with the UFC.

That’s a philosophy that Soares and Maynard share, which made it easier for them to work together on a co-promotional effort that, if successful, might very well result in the UFC scooping up the very same fighters RFA and Legacy are working so hard to spotlight here.

“That’s actually what I’m hoping for,” Maynard said. “There’s certain limitations that we have as an organization, and most of those are financial. I completely understand that these guys do this for a living.”

For Simon, however, on the TV side of the equation, that permissiveness with contracts “also creates a challenge.”

“My biggest fear was, we announce these guys for the show and then they get pulled right away to sign with the UFC,” Simon said. “It’s a unique challenge. Both guys are very supportive of allowing the fighters to grow, but you also don’t want to lose them as you market them.”

But while RFA and Legacy FC both share a similar notion of themselves as homes for developmental MMA, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to beat each other. That’s the other problem promoters have run into in the past, is trying to agree on match-ups that are competitive, exciting and fair to both sides.

“Match-ups can be difficult because you have to try to stay within a certain budget,” Maynard said. “And you don’t want to be a jerk and bring in a ringer.”

The key, according to both promoters, was remembering that everyone’s interests are best served by competitive fights – not one-sided squash matches designed to make one organization look better than the other.

“Of course I want to beat them,” Soares said. “But I think both events have really focused on putting exciting fighters there who want to go out and fight. … A lot of our fighters wanted to step up and be that guy. It gives them one more challenge.”

Still, no matter what the match-ups look like on paper, there’s always the chance that one promotion could get shut out. If both organizations are trying to brand themselves as the springboard to the UFC, it wouldn’t look great for one of them to have its fighters trounced by the other.

“I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a concern,” Maynard said. “I’m a bit nervous this week. Honestly, I look up and down the fight card, and there’s a chance we could lose every fight. I also look at the same fight card, and there’s a chance we could win every fight.”

What makes it worth the risk, according to Maynard, is the same thing that makes it noteworthy. On their own, Legacy FC and RFA only garner so much attention. They’re Friday-night fodder on AXS TV, as far as many fans are concerned. But together, pitting their fighters against one another in a rare co-promotional event, they stand to reach more people than either would be capable of alone.

It is, according to Maynard, “the most interesting thing that any promotion outside the UFC or Bellator could do, really.”

That could be good news not only for the promoters, but also for their fighters. More eyeballs on the fight means a better chance to sign with one of the big shows, and according to Soares, he’s already heard from UFC President Dana White and matchmaker Joe Silva that they’ll be watching Friday’s event closely.

That’s not lost on the fighters, Maynard said. While normally it can be difficult to talk fighters on the cusp of a UFC contract into taking difficult fights, the bigger stage promised by this co-promotional effort was enough to convince both organizations’ fighters to put those concerns aside.

“A lot of times the guys who are a win or two away from going to the UFC, let’s be honest, sometimes they’re too careful,” Maynard said. “And I understand where they’re coming from. They don’t want to take the tough ones because they’re too close. They just want to get wins. What’s impressive about this fight card is we really ran into zero troubles as far as that goes. These guys just wanted to make it happen. We normally put them on a great stage for the UFC to see them, but I think this is on another level, and I think they see that.”

If it all goes as well in practice as it has in the planning stages, Soares said, this RFA vs. Legacy FC event could be “the first of many.”

That would just fine with Legacy FC’s Maynard.

“I’m looking at it as, this is RFA vs. Legacy I,” Maynard said, “which means there’s going to be a II.”

For more on “AXS TV Fights: RFA vs. Legacy Superfight,” check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.