📝 The UFC Plans Sportswashing Spectacle

The UFC is going to the White House. If you started watching MMA in the 90’s you probably would have thought the UFC would be out of business by now. And while I am impressed by the UFC’s near total victory, I’m not sure of the fallout will be worth it.

Now let’s get into it.

On Friday, July 4th, mixed martial arts became inseparable from American politics forever. Donald Trump announced his desire to host a UFC at the White House in 2026 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America.

Okay, maybe saying MMA is not accurate. Many people don’t know the acronym MMA, what it stands for, nor its difference from UFC.

The UFC is now one and the same with the United States of America’s current political party in power. And I’m here to echo what UFC president Dana White said in 2021.

Your read that right. The man that once claimed he was trying to stay out of politics is now less than a year from throwing a sporting event at the White House.

How did we get here?

To be a professional fighter, you quite literally need to be licensed by the athletic commissions of the states you will compete in. And because states have the ability to say who they do or do not want competing in which specific combat sports, it’s kind of impossible to keep politics separated from the business of fighting. MMA in particular has had a weird relationship with politics and regulation. MMA wasn’t even legal in New York of all places until 2016!

We can trace much of MMA’s political tensions and public distrust back to 1996. Arizona Senator John McCain was labeling the budding mixed martial arts phenomenon known as the UFC as “human cockfighting”. When he became the chairman of the commerce committee in 1997 he used his power over the cable industry to push major cable operators from showing the UFC.

McCain’s strategy left the UFC on life support. By 2000, Dana White, Frank Fertitta, and Lorenzo Fertitta offered to buy the UFC and it’s assets for $2 million dollars. What followed was more than a decade of pitching cable TV networks, lobbying, and appealing to state athletic commissions to make the UFC viewable around the country. And at the beginning of this new path the UFC made an important ally.

The first two events White and the Fertittas held, UFC 30 and 31, both took place in the same arena, the Trump Taj Mahal. As Dana White later said about his host, "He saw it, he got it. He got there for the first fight of the night and stayed there until the last fight. He did it both times that we were there."

What Trump got was that the sport had a chokehold on young American males. Trump recognized MMA as an inroad to sell his personal brand to more people.

After getting UFC star Tito Ortiz onto his reality show, Celebrity Apprentice, in 2008, Trump joined MMA promotion Affliction, spun out of the clothing company with the same name. It’s not exactly clear to what extent though.

Some say Trump purchased a significant equity share in the business. Affliction’s then Vice President, Tom Atencio, claims Trump was closer to a brand ambassador. Regardless of the reality of Trump’s true involvement, Trump’s fascination and relationships within MMA would outlast Affliction.

In 2016, Trump started to capitalize on his MMA relationships. He asked White to speak at the 2016 Republican National Convention, 2020 campaign rallies, and his pre-election rally in 2024. White and the UFC even hosted Trump at UFC 264, months after the January 6th Capitol Riot.

And hosting Trump at UFC 264 and several other events worked. Trump won back the exact demographic that Joe Biden had claimed in 2020; men ages 18-49.

Regardless of what White says you can not pretend he and his fellow UFC/TKO executives are apolitical. White himself has 167 political donations registered on Open Secrets’s Donor Lookup portal.

In fairness to White, he can advocate for whoever he wants to be President. Be they a friend and business partner like Trump has been.

But I don’t know how anyone with at least one eye and half a brain can look at this political alignment alongside everything else the UFC is about to face and think this will be helpful for the future of MMA.

According to everyone reporting on combat sports, UFC pay-per-views (PPV) are down and declining faster than anyone expected. Thanks to the UFC successfully lobbying state athletic commissions for the past few decades, we have limited information about PPV buy rates and athlete pay. Those figures are now considered “trade secrets”. So we’ll just have to take the reports as truth for this one.

The reason for the UFC’s PPV apparent decline is two-fold primarily.

It is debatable how bad cards really are. At the time of writing this, we’re coming off of UFC 317.

UFC 317 had 6/11 finishes, a showcase for one of the best flyweights ever, and it was headlined by Georgian/Spanish superstar Ilia Topuria taking on the UFC’s all time finish leader, Charles Oliveira.

But UFC 317 is not the norm.

17 of the UFC’s 41 events in 2024 were forgettable cards at the UFC Apex, effectively developmental talent looking to join the big show. More worrying is the rumors that the UFC’s new streaming deal will come with more bland Apex cards pumped out to sell ad revenue against.

Personally I think it’s true that many of the UFC’s cards have less star power, but the highest levels of UFC fights have gotten better. But herein lies the problem.

The UFC is the major leagues. Athletes fight their way through regional promotions like Cage Warriors, LFA, Jungle Fight, ACA, etc. to make it into the UFC. What happens when those promotions are no longer lifting the sport from the ground up?

Last week John S. Nash put out a report with a potentially troubling trend. The number of professional MMA events is on the decline.

Why? My hunch is that the MMA industry is shrinking for 3 main reasons:

Number 3 is the most worrying and it certainly wasn’t always true.

In 2009 BJ Penn was the UFC’s lightweight champion. The UFC was showcasing him, reviving the lightweight division, and investing in lighter weight classes.

In that same year Eddie Alvarez took Bellator’s lightweight title, Gilbert Melendez won the Strikeforce lightweight title, and Benson Henderson won the WEC interim lightweight title. All 3 of those men would later fight for the UFC lightweight title. Henderson and Alvarez would win it!

Today none of those promotions exist. That means there is less money spent building up fighters, selling their stories, and creating characters people want to see join the UFC.

One of the most interesting aspects of MMA is the individual artistry of fighting. You get men and women wearing unique costumes that accentuate their personal style while showcasing acrobatic violence. If the UFC is the only game in town, we only get their sanitized version of MMA with the ruleset they use.

We no longer get sumo wrestlers fighting boxers or any other fantastic fighting permutation you can think of. We get generalized athletes doing what’s generally expected to work best in a cage wearing company mandated clothing that generally looks okay. And this is consumed by fans tolerating or celebrating White’s need to entrench himself with the President. But how long can that last?

When Dana White was fighting on the frontlines to make the UFC accepted by state regulators, his battle cry was always something like, “No matter what color you are, what country you come from, what language you speak, we’re all humans and fighting is in our DNA. We get it. We like it. It makes sense. Everybody understands it.”

If everyone understands it, shouldn’t you be trying to say anyone can join? Should you really align with the President who was the fastest to achieve majority disapproval?

Marketers and advertisers reading this might say, “Yes. That’s exactly what you should do. If you build a product for everyone, it’s for no one.”

While it might be true that being polarizing can get short term wins, it does not guarantee long term success. And that will be a huge problem for UFC and the sport of MMA in the future.

By aligning with Trump, the UFC has added a second front to the war they’re fighting to dominate MMA. Now the UFC has more to worry about than just the shrinking MMA industry. The public will see the UFC as an exclusively right wing sport.

You know who’s generally not right wing? Young people. Roughly 2/3 of people under 30 align with the Democrats. That means the UFC has positioned themselves agains the next generation of consumers and sports fans they should be trying to capture!

And if you think sports clubs, leagues, or promotions are immune from political backlash I invite you to read about Dynamo Moscow, the Russian soccer club aligned with Russia’s state police.

At one point the club was the pride of Russia. They won the first Soviet championship, dominated in the 40’s, but now they have not won a domestic league since 1976. Since the fall of the Soviet era, Russian people are wary to support a team that was ever aligned with state police. In the 1990’s Dynamo Moscow averaged a stadium that was less than half full. Today they still hardly fills half of their seats.

White was right when he said people don’t want to hear about politics when they watch sports. I just wish he took his own advice.

After Donald Trump won re-election in 2024 White said “I’m never fucking doing this again. I want nothing to do with this shit. It’s gross. It’s disgusting.”

I got bad news for you, White. It’s too late. But I guess I will say that I agree with you. Mixing politics and sports is gross.

It’s gross that you and the President used this weekend to announce plans for a UFC event next year, while during this same weekend the President’s FBI Director and Attorney General announced that the largest sex trafficking criminal in the world actually had no evidence behind their crimes and a bill was passed that reduces social services while expanding our country’s debt by trillions.

It’s gross that your sports entertainment company was used as a smokescreen to move attention away from the very real problems that are ruining your fellow citizens lives’.

Mixed martial arts and the United States of America are supposed to be for everyone. It’s gross that the people that benefitted from these revolutionary organizations are going out of their way to prevent others from doing the same.

I’ve been studying a lot of fence wrestling lately so I decided to start

a guide on fence wrestling. The best techniques, athletes to study, and some guiding principles to understand how grappling on a cage works.

I’ve started my guide by looking at Khabib’s UFC career and picking out specific techniques and habits from his time spent grinding people down along the fence.