NEW YORK — UFC chief executive officer Dana White spent hours Wednesday afternoon extolling the business potential of modern boxing—the very sport he has repeatedly called corrupt in the past.
Through UFC parent TKO Group Holdings, White is assisting the launch of a boxing promotion with Sela, an entertainment subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and Turki Alalshikh, the chair of the kingdom’s entertainment authority.
The still-unnamed league will utilize the resources under TKO-owned companies UFC and WWE, including media production and marketing from both outfits and the UFC Performance Institutes in Las Vegas, Shanghai and Mexico City. Its first fight card will take place in 2026, although the location and combatants are to be determined.
“When was the first boxing match? 1681?” White said in an interview on Wednesday. “So think about this: 1681 to 2025. Tell me something that’s created trillions of dollars in revenue, and at the end of the day, there’s nothing there. By the time we’re done, this will be a league much like the UFC. You have the brand, and there’s all these ancillary things that are built off the brand—video games, gyms, merchandise, the list goes on and on. All of these things will create revenue that will also kick back to the fighters like the UFC does.”
White’s current excitement contrasts prior comments. Just last year, White told combat sports journalist Kevin Iole that “boxing does not work” because “you need a Saudi f—ing trillionaire to make f—ing fights.”
“And even Saudi trillionaires get tired of the f—ing bull—-,” White added.
White said he felt the timing was right to move forward with a promotion after building a relationship with Alalshikh over the past year and a half. Alalshikh has wanted to reorganize boxing for some time to pull the power away from the oft-criticized sanctioning bodies, and partnering with TKO appears to be a huge step in achieving that goal.
Alalshikh, a business heavyweight from Saudi Arabia, has been a significant presence in boxing over the last few years, pledging to fix what he’s called a “broken” sport through offering huge purses for fights. Prior to the TKO agreement, he brokered a multi-fight deal with Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez in February, which is likely to include a mega-fight with Terence ‘Bud’ Crawford later this year.
White said the new league is looking at between 150 to 160 boxers, and it will be built the same way as the MMA promotion with a handful of weight classes and its own title belts.
“Because of Sheik Turki,” White said, “you have two handfuls of fighters that make millions of dollars a year. What we found is there’s hundreds of thousands of fighters out there with great records that are possibly just as talented, that make no money and have no notoriety. We’re going to give opportunities to all those guys now.”
White said that while Alalshikh looks at the sport from a macro level, “I’m down here,” gesturing his hand to say he’s on the ground. “I want to break the sport to pieces and rebuild it from the ground up. So when you take the two extremes that we have, by the time we get done doing what we’re doing, we meet in the middle.”
In TKO’s quarterly earnings call with analysts last week, president and chief operating officer Mark Shapiro said the company was deep in talks with Saudi investors to form a boxing league, with executives meeting in London to hammer out details. “We think the opportunity in boxing is extraordinary for us,” Shapiro said. “It’s the strategic, right place for us to be. We have experts in (WWE president) Nick Khan and Dana White, among others, that can drive that business.”
Shapiro said they envisioned a league with a consistent fight schedule through the year. “TKO would be the producer, promoter and responsible for the day-to-day operations of the venture where we would receive a fee of $10 million-plus,” he explained. “We’re not putting any money in, we’re not putting capital in … Additionally we would have some earn-in equity over time, specifically over a five-year period, but it would be dependent on us reaching certain milestones.”
White said the new league would comply with the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act of 2000, a federal law that imposed an ethical and governing framework onto the sport in the U.S. The Ali Act, along with the Professional Boxing Safety Act of 1996, provides legal guidelines for writing contracts, limits the amount of time fighters could be signed to a promotion, and requires promoters to disclose revenue to fighters after their bouts. UFC has historically lobbied against any expansion of federal law to include MMA.
In addition to the annual fee and equity opportunities, a boxing league also could lift TKO’s media arm. In a December presentation to investors, Shapiro said that boxing would be a natural extension to add to UFC Fight Pass as a way to grow subscriptions along with Power Slap, the slap fighting competition White founded in 2022.
UFC’s current media rights deal with ESPN is set to expire at the end of this year; the two sides are currently in their exclusive negotiating window, which ends on April 15. Meanwhile, ESPN’s own future with boxing remains uncertain, as the network’s agreement with promoter Top Rank expires in August.
White said there is increased competition for media rights in combat sports because most major team sports have the bulk of TV inventory locked up, save for MLB. He hopes there is a lucrative global media partnership in store.
“My big dream in my life was I would put on a fight one day, where it would be on the same channel all over the world, and everybody could watch it at the same time,” White said. “We’re now looking at that reality.”
