Dana White says Ilia Topuria a ‘possibility’ to headline first big UFC on Paramount card

Ilia Topuria may be the man who helps usher in the UFC on Paramount era.

Earlier this year, the UFC signed a broadcast rights deal with Paramount for $7.7 billion over seven years, which kicks in on Jan. 1 of 2026. The deal presents a new era for the UFC, which has been partnered with ESPN since 2019, and with 2025 rapidly drawing to a close, UFC CEO Dana White says the true work of their next era has already begun, including matchmaking for the first big card with their new broadcaster.

“Literally today,” White told reporters after the final episode of Contender Series when asked about planning. “Matchmaking was today, and we started working on the first Paramount card today.”

Given that the UFC likely wants to kickstart its new broadcast rights deal with a bang, fan speculation about who might headline the first Paramount card has been rampant. Though the UFC is arguably more popular than ever, it does currently have a shortage of big stars, but one of the few is lightweight champion Ilia Topuria. And as Topuria is not yet booked, many fans have wondered if he will be the man to headline the first Paramount event, something White did not confirm, but teased as possible.

“It’s a possibility,” White said when asked about “El Matador.”

And while Topuria might be the man to usher in the new era of the UFC, his Georgia compatriot Merab Dvalishvili will be the one to end the ESPN era. White recently announced that Dvalishvili will defend his bantamweight title for a fourth time this year, taking on Petr Yan in the main event of UFC 323, the final PPV event of the ESPN era, with White saying it was important to end their ESPN relationship as strongly as they began it.

“We’re always going to try to put on the best cards that we can,” White said. “We’ve had a great relationship with ESPN, and we were talking earlier, everybody is already starting to feel it. There’s a lot of relationships between the ESPN team that comes to all the fights and works and the UFC team, and everybody is starting to feel it coming to the end here. They’ve been great to us, and they’ve been great to the sport. We want to put on a badass last card for them.”