Mixed martial arts cage
MMA combat arena
Mixed martial arts cage is the typical combat area of most mixed martial arts (MMA) promotions.
According to the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, an MMA competition or exhibition may be held in a ring or a fenced area. The fenced area can be round or have at least six sides. Cages vary; some replace the metal fencing with a net, others have a different shape from an octagon, as the term "The Octagon" is trademarked by the UFC (although the 8-sided shape itself is not trademarked). The fenced area is called a cage generically, or a hexagon, an octagon or an octagon cage, depending on the shape.
On the contrary amateur MMA endorsed by United World Wrestling and Asian Mixed Martial Arts Association use open wrestling mat, instead. Global Association of Mixed Martial Arts uses both cage and open mat (tatami).
Ultimate Fighting Championship
The UFC stages bouts in an eight-sided enclosure officially named "The Octagon". Originally, SEG trademarked the concept as well as the term and prevented other mixed martial arts promotions from using the same type of cage, but in 2001 Zuffa gave permission for other promotions to use octagonal cages, reasoning that the young sport needed uniformity to continue to win official sanctioning. Today Zuffa reserves exclusive use of the name "The Octagon".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mixed martial arts cage” as mMA combat arena. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q138012796. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mixed martial arts cage” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.