Dana White is now officially a boxing promoter, but it was actually the sport he loved from an early age that influenced his decision to found the UFC.
Perhaps the biggest factor is that White and the UFC’s matchmakers have consistently delivered events that impress both the live audience and those watching on TV at home. While there’s no guarantee that every event will become an instant classic, the UFC CEO says promoting a product that fans have come to trust has made the biggest difference, especially when it comes to ticket sales.
“We got the UFC to a point where people could buy tickets before we even announced the main event,” White said on Thursday’s Joy Forum. “So we started building a relationship with a fan base that knew we were going to deliver no matter what happened. Boxing hasn’t done that in a long time.”
White often criticizes boxing for focusing on one big match at a time and not building anything, which doesn’t inspire long-term loyalty with fans.
He hopes to change that by launching Zuffa Boxing in 2026. The fledgling promotion has already secured a multi-year deal to broadcast events on Paramount.
“I saw a lot of things that I thought were wrong and broken about boxing at the time, and I’ve said for a long time that if we just keep delivering good production (in the UFC) every time, I felt like every time I saw a boxing event it was like a going-out-of-business sale,” White said. “They are trying to raise as much money as possible.
“They don’t care if the live event is good or if the TV event is good. As long as it brings in a lot of money, that’s all that matters.”
White is constantly making tweaks and changes, so production values have always weighed heavily, especially if something goes wrong during an event.
Of course, White frequently touts the appeal of attending UFC’s live events, which he believes has been a big part of the company’s growth in recent years.
“When you buy a ticket and go to an event, no matter where in the world it is, you know what you’re getting,” White said. “If you stay home and watch TV on Saturday, you know what the outcome will be.”
After White’s childhood friends Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought the promotion for $2 million and then shelled out around $40 million, the money flow showed no signs of slowing down and the UFC almost went bankrupt at one point.
The game changer, White said, has always been television, which helped him buy time on the first season of “The Ultimate Fighter” on Spike TV, which meant paying the network to air the show. There was never a guarantee that the series would be a huge hit, but White promised that he was confident it would do well once a wider audience saw the UFC’s production.
“Once this sport started to grow, you could feel it,” White said. “Even when we were facing economic adversity, we knew it was right around the corner. We were right at that tipping point, and what we needed was television.
“We needed to get it on TV and let millions of people know what we already knew. We knew that people everywhere in the world would like this product.”