Dana White is officially a boxing promoter now, but the sport he grew up loving actually played an influential part in how he decided to build the UFC.
Perhaps the biggest factor was White and the UFC matchmakers consistently delivering on events that impressed both a live audience and the people watching at home on television. While there’s never a guarantee that every event is going to become an instant classic, the UFC CEO says promoting a product that fans came to trust made the biggest difference, especially when it came to ticket sales.
“We got the UFC to a place where people are buying tickets before we even announce the main event,” White said at the Joy Forum on Thursday. “So we started to build this relationship with the fanbase that they knew we were going to deliver no matter what happened. Boxing hasn’t done that in a long time.”
White often lambastes boxing for not really building anything but only focusing on one major fight at a time, which doesn’t inspire long term loyalty with fans.
It’s something he hopes to change with the launch of Zuffa Boxing in 2026 with the fledgling promotion already securing a multi-year deal to broadcast events on Paramount.
“I saw a lot of things that I thought were wrong and broken with boxing at the time and I felt that if we kept building on delivering a good product [with UFC] every time — I’ve been saying for a long time, I feel like every time you watch a boxing event it’s like a going out of business sale,” White said. “They’re trying to grab up as much money as they can.
“They don’t care if the live event is good or even if the television event is good. As long as they can bring in a ton of money, that’s all they did.”
Production value has always weighed heavy on White because he’s constantly tweaking and making changes, especially when something goes haywire during an event.
Of course, White often pushes the appeal of attending live UFC events and he believes that’s been a huge part of the company’s growth in recent years.
“If you buy tickets and you show up at the event, no matter where in the world it is, you know what you’re going to get,” White said. “And you know what you’re going to get if you stay home on Saturday and watch it on TV.”
There was a time when the UFC was nearly out of business after White’s boyhood friends Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought the promotion for $2 million and then went in the hole for approximately $40 million with no signs that bleeding cash would end.
White says the game changer was always television, which is what led to a time-buy — essentially paying a network to air your programming — with the first season of The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV. It was never a guarantee that series would blow up but White promises he knew it would always work once a bigger audience saw the UFC product.
“As the sport started to grow, you could feel it,” White said. “Even when we were upside down financially, we knew that it was right there. We were right on that tipping point and what we needed was television.
“We needed to get it on TV and expose millions of people to what we already knew. This product that we knew people would like everywhere, all over the world.”
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