2026 is going to be the biggest year in UFC history. Coming off of $1.4 billion in revenue they just launched a seven year, $7.7 billion deal with Paramount and are planning multiple title fights at the White House on Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. We’re going to have a UFC fight on the grounds of the White House.
We’re going to take over Washington, D.C. the week of the fight. This is great news if you’re a Trump donor or a tech mogul. But for your average fan, UFC’s massive growth hasn’t necessarily been so great.
Ticket prices to attend fights are through the roof. Why do I need generational wealth to go to a UFC event? Last row in the arena for 500 bucks each. And a lot of fans feel like the product is just getting worse every year. This is going to be so badass.
And underneath all of the spectacle, a seismic shift in combat sports is quietly underway. With backing from powerful allies in D.C. and Saudi Arabia. UFC President Dana White is coming for boxing.
He launched Zuffa Boxing last year and alongside cutthroat mogul Ari Emanuel and WWE executive Nick Khan, they’re working to rewrite the laws that govern the sport. There’s no ego or arrogance whatsoever. When I talk about getting into boxing and trying to fix it because this is a busted sport. So who really is Dana White, the ruthless kingpin of the UFC and what does he want with boxing? Talk a little bit more aboutg whether you think it will be a viable competitor to some of the other straight boxing promotions?
I don’t want to say it will be a viable competitor. We’re going to blow them all out of the water is what we’re going to do. It’s hard to get fighters to speak out, but we talked to a few of them about their experiences working for Dana White. Let’s get into it. While reaching UFC is the pinnacle for MMA fighters, working for its boss hasn’t exactly been a dream.
In 2014, a group of former UFC fighters filed a class action antitrust lawsuit alleging the UFC had illegally monopolized the MMA market and suppressed fighter pay. The case dragged on for a decade. The UFC fought it every step of the way. In one testimony, Shane Carwin, a former UFC heavyweight, wrote that CTE has left him bedridden for days at a time, unable to hold down a job despite owning an engineering degree. Finally, in 2024, the UFC agreed to pay $375 million, but admitted no wrongdoing.
They decided to settle the case out of court. So for me, that was a bit of a disappointment in that we didn’t actually get to argue it, right? We didn’t get the call B.S. So in 2025, a second lawsuit was filed, this time representing fighters from 2017 onward.
Dana, meanwhile, can get pretty hostile whenever fighters or journalists bring up these lawsuits. If you want to be an asshole, let’s do it in private.g I love when people who have no fucking idea what they’re talking about don’t know anything about the business give input. Well, despite what Dana says, his intentions from the beginning were very strategic. The UFC started in 1993 as a promotion to exhibit what are now known as mixed martial arts fights, a sport most Americans had never heard of.
Unlike boxing, MMA had no sanctioning bodies overseeing it and very few rules. It was just so unregulated. My first fight actually was, I was 185 pounds and I fought a guy, 285 pounds. Total craziness. Be forewarned, there are no rules, no judges scores and no time limit.
At one point, the UFC was so brutal they banned it in 36 states. Senator John McCain famously called it human cockfighting and led the charge to get it off of Pay-Per-View. People repeatedly getting smashed in the face with the guy sitting on top of him. That’s not a sport. By 2000, the UFC was struggling.
Dana White was a boxing manager in Las Vegas and saw an opening. While boxing had strict rules and regulations – We’ll get to that later – in MMA, a single promoter could control the rankings, handpick matchups and sign fighters to exclusive contracts. Dana could build an empire. So in 2001, he connected with his childhood friends, casino moguls Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta. He approached Lorenzo and said, hey, I know this company that’s up for sale.
It’s actually prizefighting, but there’s no sanctioning bodies involved. Athletic commissions are allowing you to put on your own tournament and have your own title. If we can sign enough athletes to an exclusive contract and keep sanctioning bodies out of the game, we can own the sport. They bought the struggling UFC for $2 million. The new ownership group struggled to find consistent venues for the first UFC event after their acquisition.
Most venues rejected these early UFC events. They were deemed too seedy or grotesque. None of the venues wanted this. You know, they didn’t believe in it, they didn’t like it, and they were worried about the type of crowd that would show up for this type of event. But there was one guy in Atlantic City who saw no problem with a fledgling combat sport in a cage.
Does anybody watch UFC? The great Dana White? So Donald Trump offered to host Dana’s first event at his casino. Dana, congratulations on your first show. That’s got to feel good.
Basically, what we want to do is we want to make this The Super Bowl of mixed martial arts. And thus began the quarter century friendship between Donald Trump and Dana White. My fellow Americans, it is my honor to introduce the 45th and soon to be 47th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. And then, in a very savvy move, he turned cage fighting into reality TV.
You either cut the weight in two hours or you quit now and become eliminated where he could develop a pipeline for talent and big personalities. For fighters, this was a potentially lucrative opportunity and could help carve a path to stardom. I finally got this shot into The Ultimate Fighter. This was my third time auditioning for it, and I was like, okay, that’s it. This is my chance.
Kajan Johnson is a former MMA fighter living in British Columbia. Welcome. This is like ‘Cribs’. He now owns a gym training the next generation of fighters. Okay, Moya, daddy is going to go to the gym.
Okay. Okay, come give me a hug. After appearing on The Ultimate Fighter Kajan was offered a contract with the UFC. I was so happy. Finally.
I’m not going to be broke. Ragin’ Kajan here at Xtreme Couture, Las Vegas Bunch of heavyweights in the building. You know what it is. Finally, I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to pay rent. That was the main thing.
It was a huge relief. But that relief soon turned into an uncomfortable realization about the fine print of the deal. First and foremost, UFC contracts are exclusive, which is a huge difference from the pre-Dana White era. No one had exclusive contracts to the degree that they do now. I fought in PRIDE and in the UFC at the same time and many athletes did.
Imagine if in tennis, Wimbledon had exclusive contracts with all of their tennis players, they wouldn’t be able to play anywhere but Wimbledon. Nice work Alex. Trap that and put it behind his back. Up here. Your kick lands both hands up.
The UFC contract can lock a fighter up for three years, sometimes more even with inactivity. And the rates only modestly increase sometimes, if at all. You can be out of the UFC before three years quite easily. You could also fight for a title in the UFC before the end of that three year contract, which, if you were not able to renegotiate that contract, then you’re going to be fighting at those same rates. Those rates are what you get paid to show up and what you get paid to win.
And the money isn’t nearly as good as people might think. I was making $8,000 to show and I was making $8,000 to win. People might think that $16,000 is a lot, but I fought once that year, so $16,000 for the year, not super crazy. And expenses for the fighters come out of their own pockets. My training costs, that could be a gym membership.
My coach, your shin pads, your gloves, your headgear, healthy food, any supplements that you need to use. A lot of the time, you have to pay for your blood work because you get tested before you fight. We’re not here to take part. We’re here to take over. If you’re Conor McGregor or another top star, sure, you can afford these costs, no problem.
But for the other 500-plus fighters on the UFC’s roster, it can be a different story. It can get crazy expensive. So how were these guys even making ends meet? Fighters were able to to get all their own sponsors. If I had a friend that had a company, I could get him to sponsor me and I could put his logo anywhere on my shorts, I could wear whatever shorts I wanted.
Most times we would actually make more money on sponsorship than we made on the fight. But in 2015, the UFC signed an exclusive $70 million deal with Reebok and banned all personal sponsorships during fights and promotions. Reebok has stepped up. These guys are spending a lot of money. We’re giving every dime of the of the money that’s coming in to the athletes.
But you took 80% of our sponsorship dollars. That’s food off our kid’s table, food out of our kids mouths. And since fighters are classified as independent contractors, they also don’t get company benefits. Peter. Alex.
Your pads. That means no comprehensive health insurance, no pension, no collective bargaining rights. But they signed the contract with dreams of reaching the top. And if a fighter gets injured or is unable to compete, the UFC can pause their contract, locking them in for even longer. This is exactly what happened to Kajan.
I’m finally in the UFC, its taken like 13 years for me to get here and then bang one shot. All of that went down the drain. In his first UFC fight. Kajan was knocked out and had his jaw broken in three places. Where does it hurt?
My Jaw. Your jaw is painful? Yeah. Oh! Traumatic brain injury is nothing to shake a stick at.
For me to get back to training, it was very difficult. So I’m not able to fight. They hit pause on the contract. And if you’re not fighting, you’re not getting paid. Contracts don’t work like this in any other major sport.
So then that leads to situations where guys know that they’re injured but will fight anyway. Dana White’s M.O. is to pay the fighters as little as possible in order to make them willing to fight whoever, whenever, right? Because they’re starving.
They need to get paid. Remember when we said the UFC made $1.4 billion last year? Well, fighters see roughly 17% of that. By comparison, NFL players are guaranteed nearly half of league revenue by their collective bargaining agreement.
I think they should get paid more. I know how fucking dangerous that shit is. You should get paid generous amount of money to step into a cage fight generous amount of money to step into a cage fight for millions of people to see. So why are fighters afraid to speak out? Well, one reason is that the UFC’s monopoly power gives them a lot of power over fighter’s careers.
They control the title. They control the rankings, and they have exclusive contracts with every fighter there. If you have exclusive contracts then you can take away their leverage. you just got to look at the structure and realize it’s designed to screw you and exploit the athlete. And the same power structure that exploits fighters – It’s hurting the fan experience, too.
For one, ticket prices to UFC events have risen by 4,000% over the last two decades. Of course, some of this has to do with the massive rise in popularity for the sport, but it helps that there are no rival leagues competing for the MMA marketplace. Over the past 25 years, the UFC has squashed or acquired nearly all other promoters that could employ their fighters. The events keep breaking records. There must be a cap.
At what point do you think you may be reaching a point to out price the fans? We’re not close. I mean, we keep breaking the record. It’s also hurting fans by watering down the sport’s quality. This happens when elite athletes turn down MMA entirely because the money isn’t worth it.
Heavyweight champ Francis Ngannou, who walked away from the UFC rather than fight under their terms. He had requested better health insurance, the ability for all UFC fighters to have sponsorships and a fighter advocate present during all contract negotiations. You know how restrictive the UFC contract can be for an independent contractor. There is not really a lot of thing that you can do when you are in that contract. And what was Dana’s response to the former heavyweight champion?
So he’s full of shit there. Believe me, I have no sleepless nights over Francis leaving. The bottom line is all of this results in both fighters and fans getting a worse product out of UFC in recent years. In fact, this is exactly what happened to boxing. In its early days, boxing operated under a much less strict regulatory environment.
Promoters controlled everything at the expense of fighters and fans. Then, in 1998, heavyweight champion Mike Tyson fired and sued his infamous promoter Don King, for diverting millions of his earnings. I’m getting ready to go see 40 million bucks and I’m broke. don’t have a penny, it percolates Don is dissing me. In 2000, the system changed.
The act represents a long overdue effort to improve boxer safety, reduce conflict of interests, discourage coercive contracts, and create a uniform set of standards and procedures. The Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act passed with unanimous bipartisan support. Here’s what the Ali Act did. Number one, it required promoters to disclose financial details of contracts to fighters. Number two, it prohibited conflicts of interest.
So promoters can’t also be managers. Number three, it banned coercive multi-fight contracts that locked fighters up for years. And number four, it forbid promoters from having their own rankings and titles. In short, the Ali act gave boxers freedom from promoter control over their entire careers. Plus, boxing has multiple sanctioning bodies that recognize champions.
They don’t have to fight under one organization. It is a more competitive marketplace. Fighters have their pick of promoters and promoters, organize fights, negotiate TV deals, and market their fighters. The result is that boxers have at least some protections against being exploited, like underpaid gig workers. Do you think boxers at the championship level worry about health insurance?
Or anyone in their family worries about health insurance? Nobody. This is going to be the bread and butter of your striking. So I’m going cross, hook..
. If fighters are able to move back and forth in between organizations, if I’m able to to create a bidding war, which is how boxers make so much money, right? Create a bidding war between six different promoters and then take the highest offer. It would lead to a situation where the fighter has the power, has the leverage. But the laws passed by Congress to protect the rights and interests of boxers do not now and never have applied to MMA.
I’ve been trying to tell you guys, these TKO guys are scumbags, and now they’re trying to change the Muhammad Ali act to fuck boxers over. Get the fuck out of our sport. Well, last year, White and TKO launched Zuffa Boxing. He’s got powerful partners. Saudi Arabia’s Turki Al-Sheikh the architect behind The Kingdom’s massive sports investments.
We have just done a deal to start a new boxing league with Turkey. The model is proven to deliver the fights that the fans want to see. But with the original Ali Act in place, he can’t run boxing the way he runs UFC. So he’s backing legislation to change that. Republican Congressman Brian Jack and Democratic Congresswoman Sharice Davids introduced the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, a bill designed to revive American boxing.
Let’s join together in a spirit of bipartisanship and revive one of America’s greatest sports and the name of one of America’s greatest athletes, Muhammad Ali. On the surface, it sounds good. Guaranteed minimum pay, improved health coverage, enhanced safety protections. And it still borrows the name from the boxing legend. But inside the bill, this revival act has some window dressing and a bit of a Trojan horse.
buried in the legislation is something else. The creation of unified boxing organizations. They’d have their own rankings, their own championship belts, and crucially, they could sign fighters to exclusive long term coercive contracts. If you give me control of the entire industry, if you give me the ability to monopolize the entire industry, then boxing will be better. This is what they’re putting forth.
I’m going to build the thing from the ground up, just like we did the UFC. No sanctioning organizations No sanctioning organizations Simply stated, Dana is repackaging the UFC model for boxing. This isn’t just about the UFC. It’s about what happens when you let one company control an entire industry. It’s the same story for Amazon Warehouse employees.
Starbucks baristas and yes, UFC fighters. When greed aligns with political power, the workers in this case, the fighters who assume all of the physical risk, and the consumers, all of the passionate fans paying thousands for tickets, they end up on the losing side of things.
