Conor McGregor hasn’t fought in years. Ronda Rousey is long since retired. Brock Lesnar’s fighting days are behind him, and Anderson Silva, Georges St-Pierre, and Khabib Nurmagomedov have all hung up the gloves as well.
You’d be forgiven for asking what, if any, superstars the UFC has left, especially with Jon Jones semi-retired (after announcing his retirement earlier this summer, he returned to the testing pool, angling for a spot on next year’s UFC card at the White House).
Dana White, the promotion’s CEO and President, does not agree. Strenuously disagrees, in fact.
“That narrative has been around since f*cking— I was hearing this sh*t about Chuck Liddell leaving and Georges St-Pierre. ‘What are you going to do?’ People nonstop talk sh*t,” White said on the “IMPAULSIVE” podcast recently (h/t MMA Junkie). “You just started this interview talking to me about a $7.7 billion dollar TV deal. I could go through the metrics of this business from top to bottom, and I just told you that [Power] Slap guys have made $10 million over the last two years, and the list goes on and on.”
“The problem is that literally nobody knows anything about this f*cking business. They all have an opinion, but they don’t know jack sh*t,” the UFC’s most recognizable face went on to say. And there, perhaps, is the problem. Dana White, an exec, is the most recognizable face of the UFC to this day. Not any one fighter, save perhaps McGregor, who might, might, have a fight or two left in him.
It’s Dana White showing up on Logan Paul’s IMPAULSIVE podcast, not one of his stars. While Ilia Topuria and Islam Makhachev could be looked at as modern day GSP and Khabib’s with strong regional followings, neither have hit those heights just yet. As for trumpeting a cool “$10 million over the last two years” for Power Slap fighters, that amount probably fell out of Elon Musk’s wallet last week. Francis Ngannou made millions for his lone PFL fight to date, and tens of millions in just two boxing matches.
Perhaps purses aren’t the best judge of superstardom, especially given UFC fighters are notoriously underpaid. Still, White went back to dollars and cents defending his position.
“The UFC just signed this deal [with Paramount+]. We’ve got Power Slap. We’ve got boxing. You’ve got three of the biggest fights in boxing history. I was a part of two of them, and I’ve only done two. There’s a formula to the stuff. So when I listen to sh*t like ‘we have a superstar problem’ or we have a this problem or a that problem, my response to that is: ‘Believe me when I f*cking tell you, we have no problems.'”
On that front, Dana White is correct: with Paramount+ set to shell out over a billion dollars per year for the next seven years, the UFC has virtually no problems, other than needed a very big truck to haul off all that loot. Whether they remain capable of building the stars of the future, however, remains up for debate. But as has often been the case over the decades, stars seem to emerge regardless of whether the promotion actually builds them.
