TKO Group Holdings will hold the first weekend-long event of its three-sport portfolio, announcing Wednesday it will bring UFC, WWE and Professional Bull Riders to Kansas City in late April.
The T-Mobile Center in downtown Kansas City will host three nights of events, starting with PBR on Thursday, April 24; UFC Fight Night on Saturday, April 26; and concluding with WWE’s Raw on Monday, April 28.
Termed a “TKO Takeover,” the three-night event is part of TKO’s strategy to leverage its sports holdings to generate more fan excitement across the three properties—it will sell a one-ticket bundle for all three starting Monday—and also to increase collection of site fees, the money paid to TKO by municipalities to bring its events to town.
TKO was formed in 2023 by the combination of UFC and WWE. The company is in the midst of acquiring PBR, along with events and hospitality provider On Location and sports marketing agency IMG from Endeavor Group in a deal valued at $3.25 billion. That deal is expected to close by mid-year.
UFC, WWE and PBR have brought 60 events to Kansas City over the past two decades, including homestands from the Kansas City Outlaws, a PBR team. It’s unclear if past events have drawn site fees from the city, but an embargoed press release from TKO suggests Kansas City is paying a site fee, saying the takeover is going to the city “through an agreement facilitated by the Kansas City Sports Commission.”
Regardless whether the Missouri municipality is paying for the event to come to town, TKO has a long-term goal to expand the number of events for which it gets site fees, to add fresh revenue on top of ticket and merchandise sales. Right now, about one-third of UFC and WWE events generate site fees, according to information disclosed at a December New York investment conference hosted by investment bank UBS. Presumably the takeover fits into TKO’s aim to make some of the sports groups’ non-marquee events more appealing for hosts.
“Now those are not going to sell [for] multimillion [dollars] the way the premier events do,” TKO president and chief operating officer Mark Shapiro said about events such as WWE’s Raw and UFC’s Fight Nights at the UBS conference. “But whether it’s cash or non-cash incentives, those will sell. And it might be a St. Louis here for $1 million. It might be a Des Moines, Iowa, here for $0.5 million, but we will go wherever it is best to, again, grow the brand, grow the audience and cash in on the site fees.”
The takeover is being sponsored by VeChain, a crypto company that has been a partner of UFC since 2022.
