Even though it features the same enduring frontman in CEO/president Dana White that it has for nearly the past quarter century and largely looks the same on television, today’s UFC operates under a much different business plan and mission statement than of any other time in the promotion’s 32-year history.
Despite the consistency of year-over-year record financial growth and an aggressive shift toward both right-wing politics and a direct catering to the coveted 18- to 34-year-old male demographic, UFC in 2025 has very much become the corporate machine that it was long viewed as the complete antithesis of. And the bellowing groans of late from hard-core fans trying to navigate a new world of extreme price gouging opposite a purposely watered down product only begins to explain the larger dynamic currently at play.
The seeds of change were largely planted in 2016 when visionary brothers Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta of Zuffa LLC, the casino heirs and childhood friends of White, sold the promotion to Ari Emanuel and Endeavor for over $4 billion. Nine years later, with WWE and UFC now merged together under the Emanuel-led combat sports conglomerate TKO Group Holdings Inc., the March 5 announcement of TKO moving full-time into boxing, funded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and fronted by White, has TKO on the verge of attempting a triple monopoly across all three major combat sports (with its political connections expected to ease the fear of any regulatory issues at play).
UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones remains cryptic on future: ‘I don’t know if I wanna call it retired’
Brent Brookhouse
Or, at least, that’s what we thought until a bunch of cryptic tweets in the past week from Turki Alalshikh suggested the marriage had been abruptly annulled after the powerful Saudi Arabian adviser moved the date of TKO boxing’s expected September launch (in a superfight pairing Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford) so that it’s now head-to-head with a UFC Noche pay-per-view card from Mexico. The deafening silence from UFC in the aftermath is merely par for the course of late considering White reportedly left UFC 315 in Montreal on May 10 on his private jet to avoid addressing the media in his typical spot at the post-fight press conference.
The silence is certainly on brand for the argumentative (and often contradictory) 55-year-old White and can be viewed as just an extension of his post-pandemic assault on the media, which has included this writer featured out of context in multiple hit-piece videos aimed at many of the journalists who regularly cover the promotion yet aren’t resigned to softball questions designed at keeping their media credentials intact.
White’s silence, however, couldn’t come at a worse time in terms of fan morale considering how much the constant headlines of late demand corporate explanation, with none being more potentially damaging than the current saga of Jon Jones. The reigning UFC heavyweight champion has tweeted a firestorm of thoughts in recent days from Thailand while filming a Russian MMA reality show, all of which point to him seemingly wanting nothing to do with a superfight against longtime interim titleholder Tom Aspinall.
The general belief had already been that White has been checked out for a while now as it pertains to his job as celebrity mouthpiece for the UFC. Not only has White, when he’s not busy competing in a $10 million Baccarat tournament on the same night as a UFC event, haplessly pushed a Power Slap brand that seemingly no one wants (and continues to annually lose its broadcast home), he has appeared both indifferent and disinterested when pushed for answers at UFC events.
Some of that could be explained by White’s new focus on boxing or that much of the responsibilities he previously shouldered are now handled by breakout executive star and UFC chief business officer Hunter Campbell. But considering it comes during a time when the general consensus among fans is that UFC is ruthlessly greedy, doesn’t pay its fighters enough and has a problem creating both stars and crossover superfights (all the while trying to navigate negotiations for a new TV deal in which its seeking $1 billion per year from the likes of Netflix), this amounts to an increasingly problematic situation.
Much of Zuffa’s initial success two decades ago in running toward regulation and turning UFC into a pay-per-view vehicle came about because White and the Fertittas, who were longtime boxing fans, used its monopolistic control to design UFC around everything the disjointed business of boxing was no longer capable of providing to its fanbase.
The years that followed saw White routinely slander boxing’s reputation by calling it corrupt and using flashy catchphrases like “one-night going out of business sale” to describe each PPV while (not so subtly) suggesting that he’s the only one capable of saving it. White even had “Zuffa boxing” t-shirts made up in 2017 as he first teased a move into the sport when UFC co-promoted the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor crossover fight but was never willing to make the leap until Saudi Arabia’s private investment fund armed him with a bankroll.
Josh Barnett thinks UFC can ‘easily’ pay Jon Jones for Tom Aspinall fight: ‘They need to figure something out’
Shakiel Mahjouri
That’s what brings us back to Jones-Aspinall and an irony so thick that one doesn’t need the lyrics of an Alanis Morrissette song to decipher whether or not the whole thing is technically more of a coincidence. After years of trashing boxing, amid the same week White’s much-publicized move into the sport may or may not have come to an end amid deafening silence from TKO, UFC in 2025 has very much become the thing — boxing — it has so vocally railed against for so many years.
Boxing may have been aided over the past 18 months by the sportswashing benevolence of Saudi Arabia (just like UFC was last September when Alalshikh bailed White out by sponsoring his experiment at The Sphere in Las Vegas), but it has still done a great job delivering upon the big fights (Alvarez’s ducking of David Benavidez, notwithstanding). UFC, on the other hand, can’t seem to get out of its own way amid its shameless priority of extreme value extraction over customer satisfaction to make any of the can’t-miss attractions that wake up casual fans and create a whole new generation of new ones.
If you’re keeping score at home, the last two years alone have looked like this: UFC let Francis Ngannou walk as heavyweight champion, robbing fans of a superfight against a three-year idle Jones who conveniently returned to fighting the second Ngannou was released. A multi-year build to a Conor McGregor-Michael Chandler superfight, which featured both as coaches on Season 31 of “The Ultimate Fighter,” was routinely teased (and even booked last summer until McGregor pulled out with a toe injury) yet has never come to fruition as White continues to doubt MMA’s biggest star ever returns as McGregor’s layoff approaches four years.
UFC fans also missed out on a lightweight title fight this summer between the top two pound-for-pound fighters on the planet — Islam Makhachev and Ilia Topuria — after Topuria vacated the featherweight title only to see Makhachev do the same at 155 pounds. And then there’s Jones-Aspinall, a fight that was already unnecessarily delayed an additional two years when, following an injury to Jones after his 2023 vacant title win over Cyril Gane, UFC allowed him to push his title defense against 42-year-old Stipe Miocic off an additional year.
Now, entering the midpoint of 2025, there remains no date for Jones-Aspinall and no guarantee or update from White, even as Aspinall recently broke the UFC record for the longest reign as interim champion that is now approaching 600 days. Any boxing fans who waited the 5.5 years for Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao to finally agree to their 2015 superfight can understand how much the pot and kettle within UFC headquarters could use a talking to at the moment.
UFC’s decision to enable Jones this brazenly hasn’t just held up the heavyweight division or the arc of Aspinall’s physical prime, it has also left the 32-year-old British heavyweight, who hasn’t fought since last July, to openly admit to struggling mentally while trying to anticipate the promotion’s next move.
So, what’s the real story here: Did Jones tell UFC he would fight Aspinall in November and is simply finishing up his reality show first? Is UFC merely stalling to save Jones-Aspinall for the kickoff of its new broadcasting deal? Or, as some have speculated, did UFC actually surprise Jones by matching his financial need for “Deontay Wilder money” (which was the onus behind Jones’ original three-year layoff in 2020) only to have “Bones” still uninterested in risking his near-perfect pro record?
Sadly, no one from the UFC is talking. In fact, the only one showing his cards of late in any form has been Jones, who looked anything but months away from a fight that could truly cement him as the greatest fighter in the sport’s history when he was seen last week on social media, seemingly intoxicated and without a helmet, riding on the back of an unidentified man’s scooter in Thailand. Jones appeared even further disinterested in the fight when the subject of retirement was brought up by a fan Wednesday on social media.
Yes, this could be Jones merely continuing his trolling of UFC as some form of public negotiation. But two years after his arrival upon the heavyweight scene, the reality of who is at fault in this Jones vs. UFC equation is destined to become an irrelevant footnote now that this soap opera has been allowed to carry on for so long in such unprecedented ways.
Jones-Aspinall is merely a symptom of UFC’s larger issues in 2025 and far from the root cause. But instead of fans knocking on the doors of company headquarters to demand a generational fight with so much history at stake, many are hoping it just happens already (or, even, not at all) simply so that we can all move on from this unsavory season of waiting far past the sell-by date. Jones even joked about the fact that he hasn’t been stripped of his title while arguing with fans this week.
It’s very possible that the rumored Alalshikh-TKO divorce, as it pertains to boxing, could be the best thing to happen to the promotion, as might UFC failing to get the preferred broadcasting deal it has been angling towards for many years. Could such setbacks see UFC forced to actually try again now that its commitment to the fans and the growth of the sport has been so obviously trumped by greed and the pursuit of political leverage through government contracts with major global cities paying enormous site fees to guarantee the promotion’s return?
Yes, the corporate overlords pulling the strings for UFC might be richer than they have ever imagined in the nine years since TKO took the reins from Zuffa, but the quality of the product (amid insane ticket price increases), the silence from its leadership and the increasing apathy of its fan base can simply no longer be denied.
This isn’t merely a bunch of spoiled media members complaining about how sick they are of UFC staging weekly, faceless fights inside a decidedly soulless UFC Apex facility in Las Vegas. And it’s certainly not just a bunch of journalistic boomers reminiscing in the good ole days of Zuffa from 2008 or 2016 to lament the loss of its importance the more White continues to replace them cageside with influencers.
This is a wakeup call to the self-inflicted irrelevance being ushered upon such a great promotion like UFC through its own mishandling and a reminder that it’s the fighters, the fights and the storylines that ultimately sell PPVs and create new fans, not the reputation of a three-letter brand or the charismatic nature of its zealous public leader who is spread too thin thanks to TKO’s maniacal pursuit of monopsonistic control.
In 2025, UFC has completely lost the plot. And it shows.
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