There exists, in the MMA world today, a silent crisis – silent to the millions of fans and to the many journalists writing on and forming the public’s opinion on the sport, yet blaring to the professionals in the gyms and on the mats that make this sport happen day in day out.

As MMA became popular, and increased its fan base, thousands of people looked at it and started dreaming of becoming just like the stars that the sport created. It’s like that in any sport. But the difference in MMA is that there are more and more people out there in the schools and on the mats training and learning, putting their time, effort and money into the dream of one day turning themselves into a notable fighter, but there are less and less opportunities for them to get into a ring or cage and prove themselves worthy.

Even the men and women who started sometime ago and have managed to accumulate reasonable records are affected by this same problem. It’s becoming geometrically more and more difficult to find fights. This is causing an extreme verticalization of the sport – a multitude of people out there training, but comparatively only a trickle managing to get fights, and an infinitely small percentage of those actually managing to get into a significant event.

It is very difficult to make ends meet for small promotions. Hundreds have been created only to fold. There is a chasm between the small events and the big ones. There is hardly even a middle! And these days MMA has become famous among investors as a great way to lose money.

Over the years, people have seen the economic success that the UFC achieved in a relatively small time, and they come up with projects to do the same, only to find out that they do not know what they are doing, nor do they have the means, purpose or persistence to stick with it until their project becomes sustainable. Less and less people are now willing to try, meaning less and less events for athletes to fight in.

The real sad part is that many athletes with potential have or will give up! What does that mean? Why, we may never get to see the next Anderson Silva, the next T.J. Dillashaw, the next Yair Rodrigue, because they simply were unable to show us their skills and faded into obscurity!

This verticalization does create opportunities for the smart and unethical people to prey on the situation, though. Since there is such an unbalance between the openings and the athletes to fill them, it’s easy for scumbags to come out and reap the benefits using the hopes and dreams of these people.

It also creates the tendency for the people who manage these openings to give them to athletes for reasons other than merit. In other pro sports, athletes rise through the ranks based on how they perform. But in MMA, just as you have people winning and winning and winning while never going for titles, you have awesome athletes out there never getting a chance to be on a big stage because they don’t have a relationship, or maybe they are not pretty or don’t talk enough.

I believe that all of us who are involved in MMA, whether it be to enjoy as fans or as participants, must become aware of this. Only then will there be discussions and solutions. MMA is an embryo, nary a sport. We are only 25 years into its existence. This is only one of the structural problems MMA faces as it develops.

We differ from other pro sports in that we have no structured feeder system or ladder into the bigger leagues, as other sports have. But at some point, we must start looking at it in the same way that other sports look at themselves, from the perspective of what will be good for the sport in the long run. We are caught up in the vice of immediatism. All we can see is the next two or three months. But if we want to have a meaningful sport in the future, we must move past this. We must discuss and create solutions.

Alex Davis is a lifelong practitioner of martial arts and a former Brazilian judo champion. A founding member of American Top Team, Davis currently oversees the careers of a number of prominent Brazilian fighters, including Edson Barboza, Antonio Carlos Junior, Rousimar Palhares, Thiago “Marreta” Santos, Antonio Silva and Thiago Tavares, among others. Davis is a regular contributor to MMAjunkie, sharing his current views on the sport built through his perspectives that date back to the Brazilian roots of modern MMA.