Dana White has been a part of many broadcast deals that brought UFC to where it is today, from the Spike TV breakthrough to the dalliance with FOX to the modern era with ESPN.
Those deals have all helped shape UFC into a multi-billion dollar behemoth poised to capitalize once the promotion’s current ESPN contract expires in 2025. But look through the graveyards of any big business and there’s plenty of failed deals that never got off the ground for one reason or another. It’s no different for the MMA leader. In a recent interview with FOX News, UFC CEO White recounted two big-money deals, in particular, that blew up at the eleventh hour because of White’s unwillingness to compromise his goals.
“I don’t know if you know that, we did a deal with HBO,” White told One Nation. “We were going to put fights on HBO. HBO came in and started going, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have to turn this music down, this is going to have to’ — and I said, ‘No, no. You guys are not running our production and telling us what to do.’
“We had already signed the deal. We were done. So I literally called [former UFC CEO] Lorenzo [Fertitta] and said, ‘Yeah, we can’t do this deal.’ He’s like, ‘What do you mean we can’t do this deal? The deal is done. We have a deal.’ [I said,] ‘We’ve got to get out of this deal.’ And Ari [Emanuel] got us out of the HBO deal.”
“I believe that if we had let HBO do what they wanted to do, it would’ve hurt us and hurt our brand,” White added. “Yeah, it would’ve made it stale and old and like boxing was.”
Dana White reveals blowing up potential HBO, CBS deals over ‘stale and old’ production issues - MMA Fighting
