For UFC, It's Leverage Above All Else

At least in the U.S., UFC has prioritized removing any point of leverage that could be used against them - even if it means alienating once loyal audiences.

Last week, accused sex trafficking brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate (Andrew has also been accused of rape by multiple women) attended a Power Slap event in Las Vegas, Nevada. UFC President Dana White, Power Slap’s lone fan, was seen on camera warmly greeting the brothers, telling them, “Welcome to the States, boys.” White has not been shy about welcoming a bevy of various right-wing figures to his sporting events, but as the New York Times reported, the Tate brand is so radioactive even some right-wing commentators and activists were appalled by White’s decision.

Supporters of the Tate brothers will note they have yet to suffer criminal convictions for accusations made against them. While technically true, one doesn’t need a legal evidentiary threshold to still find them odious. Conviction may eventually happen, but is also beside the point. The volume of accusations matched by reams of corroborating evidence by numerous women in multiple countries - to say nothing of Andrew’s various own grotesque admissions - are sufficient to deduce these are, at best, questionable characters.

But this ultimately raises the question: if the Tates are bad for business and White or the UFC are ostensibly doing what most businesses do in casting a wide net for maximum appeal, why would White risk jeopardizing that?

The answer is there is little evidence White and the UFC are interested in courting certain kinds of once loyal audiences anymore, at least in the U.S., despite being the company’s largest and most important market.

To be sure, UFC is a global brand. The promotion has held marquee events in five continents, enjoys lucrative media rights deals in well over one hundred countries and routinely features fighters from dozens of nations.

Given these realities, it’s fair to conclude UFC’s business and brand cannot strictly be considered American. It’s also worth observing whatever their relationship to culture wars or political battles in the U.S., some of that might not be visible, relevant or resonate with overseas audiences.

Back home, however, it’s a different story.

What must be understood is the UFC and White hate to be leveraged. They hate to be told what to do or to be made to do it. This is not new and, in fact, is such a core principle of how they operate that it’s baked into their corporate DNA.

This has been and remains visible in countless ways. They’ve famously refused to budge on disputes with disgruntled fighters (Frank Shamrock, Fedor Emelianenko, Randy Couture, Francis Ngannou among a litany of others), often preferring their permanent exile to any version of detente.

While the organization did recently elect to settle a historic class-action lawsuit brought by former fighters, the evidence revealed in discovery underscores aggressive corporate behavior aimed at unfairly reducing athlete wages and boosting anti-competitive behavior. Documents reveal athletes, technically independent contractors, were routinely cajoled into accepting deals or arrangements incontestably more in UFC’s interest than it ever could be in their own. Other promotions were alleged to have been acquired and then purposely shuttered without due diligence being conducted to reduce market competition.

This could be considered typical business hardball, but the through line is their unwillingness to even be in a position where they have to budge. Every firm prefers to operate on their own terms, but UFC has shown an unwillingness to ever negotiate the terms of any position once they’ve ascended past it.

Furthermore, when White was seen hitting his wife (and she him) on New Year’s Eve of 2023, he later told the media his only punishment would be the reputational stain he’d have to suffer. But in refusing even basic suspension, he was effectively saying there’d be no punishment and the public would simply have to get over it. If there was reputational damage, it’s hard to detect now that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appointed White to sit on the board of Meta, a titan of the tech industry worth well over $1 trillion.

The UFC also played host to not merely prominent political figures at their events, but intensely polarizing and partisan ones where UFC’s objective wasn’t merely to provide good seating. Instead, they’ve served as a vessel for image rehabilitation.

When UFC fighters offer confused admiration for Adolph Hitler, White might respond by verbally berating them, but categorically refuses punitive action in any way. In fact, the promotion doesn’t merely employ fighters who engage in divisive rhetoric, but now cashes in on the associated controversy.

UFC has even gone so far as to align themselves with brands like Black Rifle Coffee or Jeremy’s Razors, companies that don’t purport to do anything beyond their competitors in terms of the core product other than overtly signal they’re in political alignment with right-wing customers.

The UFC might have once attempted to cast a wide net of popularity while they were the scrappy underdog story in sports. When they were desperate for mainstream attention, their narrative was about fighters who were once math teachers, their advanced safety protocols and being the antidote to boxing’s failed practices. Fighters were let go from the roster for off-color jokes or fined for anti-gay slurs.

There is a debate to be had about what the appropriate response should be in any one of these situations, but UFC has eschewed even that in favor of a total laissez-faire approach. They have been crystal clear they plan to do nothing. In the case where UFC star Conor McGregor was found civilly liable for sexual assault in Ireland, White famously responded to questions from the media saying it doesn’t even make sense for him to have any kind of response. This resistance was to show media outrage carries no currency.

The accumulative total of this behavior is one of the more interesting and least-covered elements on modern fandom in MMA: the quiet exodus of those who’ve had enough.

Stateside fans who are turned off by the UFC’s hard right pivot have seemingly exited the sport. I am going to caution that a) this is an educated guess and b) no reputable firm has studied the phenomenon I am describing. For now, anecdotal evidence is my only guide. This limits that certainty with which we can draw conclusions.

The signs, however, are unmistakable. For starters, it is hard for me to overstate just how much fans who fit this description have reached out to me to express their dismay and disdain over the last several years. Conservatively, that number has reached the hundreds and more likely, the thousands.

Moreover, their complaints all mirror each other: in addition to whatever issues they might have with the UFC product itself, the Trump boosterism, White striking his wife to no punishment, athlete racism or homophobia or, now, the embrace of credibly-accused sexual traffickers, a significant portion of fans can no longer associate with the sport or support UFC.

An MMA fan wrote me an email recently about his reservations regarding White and the UFC, echoing all of the hallmarks of many fans before him who’ve written me:

And then there’s the fact that the minute Dana was allowed to slap his wife and get away with it, they lost the chance for crossover appeal as long as he is the head of the sport. At one point, when Amanda Nunes was champ, I had some of lefty friends at my house when one of her fights was starting. None of them were UFC fans. And none of them wanted to be. But they all stayed, and I talked them through Amanda’s story and the stakes of the fight. By the time she knock her opponent out, everybody was cheering for her. But those people now know Dana White as the guy who slapped his wife. I can’t sell that.

And that has been followed up by an ugly period of fighters being openly homophobic, openly flat earthy, and openly pro-Hitler. I really can’t sell that.

…

Finally, the best thing the NFL did was to realize that EVERYBODY likes football. Women, LGBTQ folks, Republicans, Democrats, people who hate breast cancer… EVERYBODY. So why not make it clear that you like those people too. The NFL markets its product to a wide variety of people, or at least it doesn’t make those feel like the NFL hates them. Obviously the NFL still has a way to go, but it is a sport with overwhelmingly conservative owners and like the UFC, more conservative players, and yet they are the most popular sport by far in the states.

At one point I was a fan who bought nearly every pay-per-view. I haven’t bought one since Dana slapped his wife.

In November of 2019, President Trump attended UFC 244 at Madison Square Garden in deep blue New York City. The response even according to right-wing commentator Joe Rogan was Trump got booed. Contrast that with Trump’s appearance at UFC 309 in the same venue in the same city in November of 2024 where Trump was greeted with roaring cheers.

In just five years, a near complete turnover occurred.

A rapid ideological homogenization happened within the UFC fanbase, but it’s unlikely what best explains this is a vast political change of heart. While Trump did enjoy some electoral gains even in blue electoral districts, he’s still upside down in New York. A better explanation is UFC has both recruited new fans along expressly partisan lines in a sport with heavy fan turnover while simultaneously pushing out those who can’t stomach the company’s changed posture.

There’s a refrain White employs frequently now in describing which entities he chooses to do business with, namely, he wants to work with those who “share [his] values”. And while there is genuine worldview overlap in play, White’s desire to never have to succumb to the pressure of advertisers or network executives or even disgruntled fans who take issue with his decisions in the the true motivation.

When White lashed out at reporter Loretta Hunt in 2009 with epithets, he was greeted with fiery pushback from key business stakeholders and some within the MMA community itself. When the UFC pushed forward holding shows in the early stage of the pandemic in order to meet content demands for their ESPN broadcast deal, they drew the ire of top execs at Disney, California political leaders and even concerned fans.

But now a switch has been flipped. When White exchanged blows with his wife or his athletes publicly espouse questionable worldviews, no amount of outcry deters him or the business.

And, coincidentally, given the ideological realignment of the industry that UFC’s pivot has ushered in, there’s almost no one left to even offer outcry anymore. If you placate the broadcaster, push out unhappy fans, switch over sponsors, all amidst a broader monopolistic control of the industry, who is there to challenge his or the UFC’s decisions? Who is there to voice displeasure? Who is capable of exercising leverage against them to deter or change this behavior?

The decision to publicly buddy up to the Tates is partly one of kindred spirits embracing one another, but also a flex: what are you going to do about it? Don’t like it? Leave. It allows White to lean further into his aforementioned “values” with each passing event with less and less friction.

As it stands, UFC is as financially healthy as one could possibly imagine. They are the MMA industry. If they get their way, they might even become the entire combat sports industry within a few years. Court documents show they make 90 cents of every dollars generated in the MMA industry. They made well over $1.3 billion in 2023 and considerably more than that in 2024.

Some have suggested cracks in the foundation have started to emerge. ESPN has reportedly grown unhappy with UFC’s content offerings. There is some hinting pay-per-view buys are struggling. Even assuming this is true - something that remains to be independently corroborated - this could strictly be a function of their decisions around how to manage their content more than anything else.

Yet it also strains credulity a brand once obsessed with mainstream acceptance could suffer no downstream effects after pivoting so dramatically into aggressively partisan directions. They’ve almost gone out of their way to alienate key groups of longstanding fans. While no effort to measure this effect has taken place, available indicators suggest a wave of quiet quitting from former MMA fans has happened.

And maybe that’s the point. With total market control and now ideological homogeneity pushed top down into the industry, there’s little mechanism for UFC to be pressured by anyone or anything. Anyone who would’ve tried is likely gone. Media outcry, when it even exists, is utterly impotent now. There’s no fan boycott looming. Sponsors seem on board. Anyone who remains either enthusiastically supports the pivot or is otherwise tolerant of it.

The practical effect here is to embolden UFC to go further and further into their own indulgences. If White wants to play host to internationally-accused sex traffickers, who is left to rein him in? They’ve insulated the business from virtually every kind of external pressure. And at the core of it, it’s still the same flex: what are you going to do about it? Don’t like it? Leave.

To the best of my approximation, some already have.