Y’all know I’m a hater.

But I have to admit that the UFC and Dana White put on an all-timer of a spectacle at the White House.

There was even a great fight at the top of the card.

Dana White might not run the UFC, but he produces their TV really, really well

Mad props to Dana White, Craig Borsari, Zach Candito, and Dana’s production team, who outdid themselves and created many visually epic television moments.

The AI slop is a separate conversation for another day. Teddy Roosevelt be damned.

Dana White was also visibly animated and in fine form at the post-fight press conference, as he should have been following a career-peak performance at his real job — producing the UFC broadcasts.

At the post-fight presser, White got to brag about a phone call he received from Paramount’s nepo-baby CEO David Ellison, who was “elated” at the “off the charts” numbers the broadcast drew.

The Libs Were Trolled Hard, But Ari Emanuel Couldn’t Hide His Closeness to Trump

Dana White also served ably in his capacity as rodeo clown for his boss Ari Emanuel, walking out with Donald Trump in an attention-monopolizing TV moment.

Ari Emanuel, the King of liberal Hollywood who also remains an inside power player in Democratic politics and would love to see his brother Rahm do well in the 2028 US Presidential cycle, cannot afford to be publicly associated with this current POTUS. Despite reaping the rewards of UFC & WWE generating billions of dollars, the powers-that-be somehow managed to keep fighters from going over to Ari Emanuel for a handshake or fist bump. That role was left to Mark Shapiro.

Keen-eyed observers, like my colleague Zach Arnold, couldn’t miss the reality that the ONLY person whose hand Trump shook after the big walk-in with Dana to the Octagon and before sitting down cage side was TKO chair, Ari Emanuel.

Why does Ari Emanuel work so hard to stay out of the official “UFC and Dana White plus Donald Trump = BFFs”?

Well, Trump’s polling numbers and the polling numbers for the UFC White House event itself were abysmal. Yes, UFC White House was such a big deal that multiple big-time polling outfits spent time and energy on it.

And with Trump having lost most of the support from the young male UFC demo that Dana White and Ari Emanuel worked so hard to help him earn in 2024, one wonders what long-term damage to the UFC’s brand equity is being done by associating so closely with Trump.

But that’s a problem for another day, especially when there are so many tasty money-making opportunities for Ari and TKO while Trump is in office — whether it’s POTUS buying TKO stock, using Trump’s crypto to pay the fighter bonuses (convert that shit to cash ASAP, guys), or getting to show off boxing champ Tyson Fury on camera at the event as a political flex and a middle finger to Eddie Hearn — Fury was reportedly banned from entering the US in 2022 because of his “deep and well-documented connections” to Daniel Kinahan, “the suspected leader of one of Ireland's most powerful organized crime groups” who was recently arrested in the UAE.

And besides, the utterly debunked Dana White + Donald Trump myth is utterly dominating the media narrative no matter how much of it is BS. Zuffa Myth 2.0!

And speaking of shady… Ali Abdelaziz got his victory lap in the Octagon and kissed President Trump’s hand.

That’s not even mentioning whatever the fuck was going on with Daniel Cormier’s tweeted and deleted claim that Eric Trump supposedly asked him about “rigged fights.”

FWIW, Cormier claims he was hacked, and Trump denies they’ve ever spoken.

And yes, the libs were trolled and trolled hard by:

• The massive wave of MSM media coverage before the event, focusing on Dana White as some manosphere pioneer and visionary;

• The very idea of holding a cage fight on the White House lawn as an offense to DC company town sensibilities;

• And a cheap, cringe-worthy crack about Michelle Obama from ick-meister Josh Hokit that got ridiculous coverage from credulous media like Tim Miller & Jemele Hill.

Anyone expecting effective opposition to the most corrupt and inept administration in US history to come from the MSM and their shitlib Democratic establishment-loving consumers should be desperately seeking alternatives.

The Fights Were Great, But The Outcomes Were Disastrous

The UFC’s matchmakers broke from their usual mindless meat grinder and copped the squash match style we saw at MVP’s Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano show.

Up until the last two fights of the night, the pattern was predictable. Blue corner bad, red corner good. Blue side jobbing, red side favorites. An ode to political team colors.

UFC matchmakers booked a set of fights that were clearly designed to give showcase wins to defending lightweight champ Ilia Topuria and aspiring triple weight class champ Alex Pereira, as well as favorites Sean O’Malley, Josh Hokit, Maurício Ruffy, and Bo Nickal.

Only the curtain jerker between Diego Lopes and Steve Garcia and the co-main event with Pereira vs. Gane featured relatively close odds going into the event.

Unfortunately for the best laid plans of the UFC, Topuria and Pereira took brutal losses that might have permanently damaged the drawing power and fighting capacity of both men.

Justin Gaethje improved from interim lightweight champ to undisputed lightweight champ with a dramatic and brutal win over Ilia Topuria. The dramatic and gritty win should propel Gaethje into the ranks of all-time great lightweights.

Unfortunately for the promotion, Gaethje turns 38 this fall and has had 33 hard-fought fights in his fifteen-year career. Is retirement on the table?

And in cementing his legacy, Gaethje did visibly massive physical damage and untold psychic harm to the previously undefeated 29-year-old Topuria, who is fresh off a hostile divorce.

Going into the bout, Topuria was one of the promotion’s two biggest global stars — welterweight champ Islam Makhachev being the other.

Maybe the loss was karma for Topuria, if the story Makhachev told Red Corner MMA is true:

“I can show you the chats with my manager… He called me, ‘The White House event, a fight against Topuria.’ And I said, ‘Let’s go,’ right away,” Makhachev told Red Corner MMA. “I didn’t even ask for it, but Ali said that the pay would be higher because it was the White House. And I said, ‘It’s even better.’ But the next day he called me and said, ‘It’s cancelled.’ I said, ‘Why, what went wrong?’ And he told me that [Topuria] asked for some insane money. And that was it… His manager himself said it in an interview, ‘The money we were offered for the fight was not enough, so we turned it down.’... Ilia may say whatever he wants, but it was his manager who negotiated.”

As a fight promotion, the UFC would have been indisputably better off booking Topuria vs Makachev regardless of the cost, but TKO is a value extraction machine, not a fight promotion.

A fight promotion books Ace vs. Ace fights for its biggest cards because that way no matter who wins and how, they still have at least one top draw emerging as a winner after the event.

As is, they’ve got Justin Gaethje, a fighter who is very close to his fighting expiration date. His mother supposedly wanted him to consider retirement after the UFC White House fight. How can Gaethje top winning the main event in the nation’s capital? What kind of purse will Ali Abdelaziz negotiate on his behalf to not retire?

UFC matchmakers Sean Shelby & Mick Maynard clearly didn’t expect Justin Gaethje to slaughter Paddy Pimblatt and Ilia Topuria. Pimblatt was supposed to be UFC’s next big thing, and now he’s back at the drawing board. Topuria may have had years shaved off his life.

As for Alex “Poatan” Pereira, UFC White House was a terrible event.

Before the interim Heavyweight title fight, Pereira’s allegedly unsavory personal life got some brutal coverage from one of Canada’s top publications as a result of the dramatically higher profile of this UFC event with the mainstream media.

And on fight night, Poatan flat got his ass-whipped by now interim champ Ciryl Gane, and his dreams of becoming the first-ever three-division UFC champ now seem like impossible hubris.

Don’t get me started about Cyril Gane, who “earned” the opportunity via eye-poking rightful champ Tom Aspinall into a No Contest at UFC 321 last fall.

Since Aspinall may never fight for the UFC again — whether it’s because his eye was so damaged by Gane that he might not fight again or because he’s now being managed by Dana White’s new worst enemy, boxing promoter Eddie Hearn, who insists “‘F*ck that! I won’t let him (fight again under his current UFC deal).”

The heavyweight division is in its worst shape since 2003. Josh Hokit has taken out both Curtis Blaydes and Derrick Lewis.

What are we left with? The ghost of Jon Jones? A re-match between Cyril Gane and Alexander Volkov? Sergei Pavlovich? Can UFC access PFL star Vadim Nemkov? A return of Francis Ngannou? The heavyweight politics are an absolute mess.

Andy Foster’s Doctor’s Terrible Terrible Call

For those who reflexively blamed DC for the abysmal fight doctoring in the main event, keep in mind that UFC exec Marc Ratner chose to bypass the DC combat sports commission and instead hired the Association of Boxing Commissions to oversee UFC White House.

ABC is a trade organization, not a regulator. Even by ABC standards, officials in the Eastern regional zone (zone #1) should have been working the event as regulators according to the ABC constitution.

Instead, it was Andy Foster and his California crew (zone #5). Athletic inspector Mark Relyea, referees Jason Herzog & Mike Beltran. ABC President Tim Shipman from Florida was also present. Both Foster and Shipman testified to Congress on behalf of the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act. They both got the nod to be at the UFC White House event.

We got to see ABC sanctioning play out in front of our very own eyes after round three of Topuria vs. Gaethje.

Topuria told his corner that he couldn’t see. The appointed doctor did a quick eye exam with his finger and told referee Marc Goddard no more. However, someone else stepped into the scene, and before we knew it, Goddard was allowing Topuria to fight round four. It would prove to be a big mistake. Topuria got bludgeoned and barely could make it to his stool at the end of R4. It was Topuria’s corner who had to stop the fight.

Who decided for Topuria to continue fighting and absorbing as much unnecessary punishment as he did? The responsibility falls at the feet of Andy Foster and Marc Ratner, whose org had control over the choice of the ringside physician.

If the Ali Revival Act gets passed in the US Senate, it will dramatically empower ABC authority. That means Andy Foster, Tim Shipman, and former President Mike Mazzulli will be the big winners. You will be seeing a lot more of them.

Between current ABC management and Tyson Fury’s appearance at the White House, TKO revealed who their favorites are right in front of your face.

But don’t expect the MSM or MMA pundits to spend much time on it.

So all in all, the UFC and Donald Trump both got to claim big victories Sunday — Trump was also once again celebrating a newly announced ceasefire in his disastrous war of choice with Iran — but time will tell at what cost.

Ari Emanuel is laughing all the way to the bank. From courtside at MSG to watch the New York Knicks in Game 3 of the NBA Finals to UFC White House, it was one hell of a sporting week for the King of Hollywood. Will the mainstream media’s refusal to name Ari Emanuel as a key Trump insider ever break down?

Nate Wilcox is the editor-in-chief of The MMA Draw. He founded Bloody Elbow in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Well, the day many of us have been dreading finally arrives on Sunday. It’s the Akira moment of the UFC and Donald Trump’s symbiotic relationship. UFC Freedom 250 comes to us from the White House lawn on Sunday (lawsuits, lightning strikes and gnat swarms notwithstanding).

If you’re like me, it’s hard to get excited for the spectacle that awaits us. The production is going to be filled with bizarre bullshit and there will be a camera on Trump for every second he manages to keep his rheumy eyes open.

The top two fights are pretty good, when viewed in a vacuum. The main event is Ilia Topuria vs. Justin Gaethje in a lightweight reunification bout. The co-main is Alex Pereira vs. Ciryl Gane for the interim heavyweight title.

The rest of the card is good, but nothing special. We’ve got Sean O’Malley vs. Aiemann Zahabi, Josh Hokit vs. Derrick Lewis, Mauricio Ruffy vs. Michael Chandler, Bo Nickal vs. Kyle Daukaus and Diego Lopes vs. Steve Garcia.

We’ve made our picks for the fights below. Scroll down and see who we think is going to get their hand raised on the White House ;awn.

Last week we all did pretty good. Steph did the best, though. She killed it with an 11-1 record. Miguel also did well, taking the top spot from me (since I missed on my lock pick — Fares Ziam).

Leader board

UFC Freedom 250 picks and predictions

Ilia Topuria (-520) vs. Justin Gaethje (+390)

Miguel Class: I think nearly everyone I’ve talked to about this fight has the same general feeling. Gaethje seems to be in the part of his career where he is regressing, as evidenced by a horrendously sloppy fight with Paddy Pimblett, while we’re all not sure if we’ve even seen Topuria’s ceiling yet. That, plus the fact that Gaethje doesn’t have a style that can keep him out of danger for extended periods of time, leads to an overwhelming feeling that it won’t take long for the American to suffer the same fate as Charles Oliveira, Max Holloway, and Alexander Volkanovski.

Read more

Thursday’s press conference at the State Department with UFC mastermind Lawrence Epstein, brand ambassador Dana White, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was the perfect encapsulation of the marriage between TKO and the State.

Enjoy your combat sports being controlled by sovereign wealth funds, Wall Street, and world leaders?

This was exactly the premise behind Scott Barrett’s TKO bull thesis. A state-sponsored multi-monopoly that is in the early innings of growth.

It’s a Big Club and you’re not in it. You are no longer the primary customer. This has been our calling card at The MMA Draw since we first launched this Substack in 2023.

Zach Arnold was right. My fragile ego required me to state that declaration. Lots of people are trying to take credit for knowing what Ari Emanuel’s game all along was while also not stating his name. Lots of people in chattering classes are trying to self-aggrandize their prognostication skills while twisting themselves into knots.

Our readership knows the truth.

Paid subscribers to The MMA Draw have been years ahead of the curve in understanding what Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro wanted to accomplish with Endeavor (and now TKO). Ari’s vision of UFC was vastly different than the vision of Frank & Lorenzo Fertitta. Ari saw the value of UFC & WWE as a political mercenary and government contractor. That was always the process play.

Ari Emanuel understood a key business principle under the Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 White Houses: if you have a concentration of wealth, then the government will act as a multiplier on your behalf. Millions become billions.

This is exactly the scenario we warned about when we asked how Ari Emanuel would benefit from dumping President Joe Biden in favor of President Donald Trump in the 2024 election cycle.

Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro are living the good life court side at MSG for the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals. They just bought a piece of the Las Vegas Raiders. Your money — and mine — is helping to finance their life of luxury.

A government contractor and political mercenary

Frequent readers of The MMA Draw have read many variations of articles over the last four years based on this theme. We were often accused to playing “one note.”

The point being, we pushed this line of analysis because it was entirely accurate.

The marriage of combat sports with the State. The marriage of Wall Street, Sovereign Wealth Funds, and world governments.

• UFC’s $7.7 billion dollar with Paramount.

• The Trump FCC approving the Paramount/Skydance merger thanks in part to Ari Emanuel’s negotiating efforts.

• The impending marriage of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery thanks to massive Sovereign Wealth Fund financing.

On every single side of the deal, Ari Emanuel constantly benefits from conflicts of interest. How does he get away with it? Ari gets away with it because even when he’s seen on camera, no one can come to an agreement on what reality is. Even people who know of him or acknowledge his existence can’t agree on what he does or how he makes his money, so it creates a perfect bubble for The King of Hollywood to operate in.

But there’s a much larger principle at stake.

As you read the breathless coverage this week about Trump and Dana or Trump and the UFC, understand that these two individuals are largely character actors in a much larger scheme.

The real power players are Egon Durban (of Silver Lake), Khaldoon Al Mubarak (of Mubadala), and Ari Emanuel (the TKO ringleader). Within the UFC universe, (Ike) Lawrence Epstein is the real brains behind that office. Ike’s rise in public profile is not a coincidence. He’s one of the few holdovers from the Fertitta Era who transitioned beautifully into Endeavor’s world.

Which made Lawrence Epstein’s appearance at the State Department hearing to announce their Memorandum of Understanding with UFC all the more remarkable.

If you understand the Top 10 TKO power players in 2026, you will know more than 99.99% of the people on this planet who is really running the show.

We will get to what was said in Thursday’s UFC/State Department press conference in a minute. However, there is something much larger at play that must be addressed.

Thursday’s announcement was not just TKO cashing in on a Trump 2.0 White House. It was also Ari Emanuel preparing TKO for Life After Trump.

Ari Emanuel is skillfully positioning politically-controlled assets for the US 2028 Presidential Election campaign. He has assets on both the Democrat and Republican sides. On the Blue Team, Ari has his brother Rahm Emanuel, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. On the Republican side, he has Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Secretary Rubio attended multiple UFC events with President Trump and has now reached a MOU between the State Department and UFC. None of this is a coincidence.

Dana White, the Ultimate Diplomat

Thursday’s press conference was shockingly nauseating even by currently low standards in shamelessness. It may as well have been Secretary Rubio’s audition speech for the Ari Emanuel endorsement sweepstakes.

Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, wasted no time in pushing the virtues of UFC’s power as one of America’s biggest and best exports of soft power.

“When you think about it, UFC is tailor made for diplomacy arguably more than any other sport and why is that? Why do people like and respond to sports?

“It’s because sports is a stand-in for combat. It is the most ancient and universal form of contention. Not only does UFC draw on that universal human tradition but it is tailor made for diplomacy because it accommodates and embraces all different international fighting styles. Whether you are a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu artist or a Chinese Kung Fu master or an American boxer, UFC is a sport where you can fight and you can win.

“UFC draws on some essential strands of the American character. In America, we cheer for somebody who can get knocked down and get bet back up again and win the match. Not only that, the Octagon is the ultimate meritocracy. That’s something Americans respond to. It’s something our diplomatic partners around the world respond to.

“People I meet at hotel lobbies and places like that and I ask them, what do you like about America? What American brands, what American figures, what American celebrities are known here? I cannot tell you how often UFC comes up.”

Quick, someone at WME Group hire her for media representation when she leaves the Trump Administration.

Then it came time for our favorite smooth operator, Lawrence Epstein, to make his sales pitch on the value of UFC in American diplomatic affairs.

“UFC is an incredibly global sport and an incredibly global organization. We’re doing 43 events per year and about 17 or 18 of those are in jurisdictions around the world. If you take a look at our roster of fighters, we have fighters from in excess of 75 countries. When you look at our roster of champions, they come from all over the world and so we’re perfectly suited, very excited to be part of this program because we truly are a global sport and a global brand.

“I agree 100% with [Sarah Rogers]. We are a global brand and a global sport but we are American at heart and our cultural values are American. That grit, that get-up after you’ve been knocked down, that refusal to ever lose. And the story of our business, too. We started literally from one person who’s standing over there (Dana White) to where we are today. It’s an incredible entrepreneurial story also.

“So, we’re incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to build from sport from a business standpoint. We are very honored to be part of this program and really look forward to helping the World get closer together.”

When it came time to introduce Dana White, Lawrence Epstein made a hilarious sales pitch that raised more questions than answers.

“This guy is an incredible diplomat. He might not be a professional diplomat like those in this room but he is an incredible and accomplished diplomat. I’ve seen him with heads of state from around the world. I’ve seen him navigate difficult situations in China, Russia, all over the world this guy has been and it’s his personality, it’s his ethos that sort of embodies the entire UFC organization.

“I consider him our chief diplomat.”

Remember when Dana White traveled to Shanghai last year and watched fighting robots? Is Mr. Epstein claiming that Dana White was involved in an unofficial diplomatic mission on behalf of President Trump in August of 2025?

Remember when Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina was involved in a prisoner swap? She reportedly is/was the girlfriend of one of the boxing coaches at Peter Berg’s gym (which used to be called Wild Card West but is now called Matchroom Churchill). Peter Berg and Dana White were credited with having a diplomatic role in Ms. Karelina’s release.

Dana White and Russia is an interesting angle to pursue. It might be something President Trump capitalizes on towards the end of his second White House term.

So, what did our favorite UFC brand ambassador have to say at Thursday’s State Department press conference?

“Obviously, we come from very humble beginnings when we first bought this company 25 years ago. We believed, at that time, that this thing would work everywhere and would work all over the world. I’ve always had this philosophy that, Thank God, it ended up being true. It doesn’t matter what color you are, what country you come from, what language you speak, we’re all human beings and fighting is in our DNA. We get it and we like it.

“I’ve laid in my hotel room in England trying to figure out cricket. Never going to happen. But fighting in any language, as humans we all get it.

“What’s been fascinating in our run over the last 25 years is how we go into these different countries, Presidents of the countries or royal families from these different countries, everybody loves the fights and more importantly if somebody looks like you, talks like you, and comes from where you come from and they’re looked at as the best in the world when it comes to fighting, the entire country rallies around them and it’s a pretty powerful thing.”

Truly the Ultimate Diplomat.

Then came time for Secretary Rubio to give a 10-minute political hard sell about why taxpayers should be funding UFC in the name of American diplomacy.

“Why UFC? I have a couple of reasons why it’s very powerful.

“The first is America and the idea behind America is the impossible. That someone tells you can’t do that. The whole idea of America is audacious. The very idea that you could have a country founded on the principle that your rights come not from your government but from your Creator was an audacious idea. Beyond that, everything we’ve done since then as a nation time and again, how you can achieve some of the things (we have). We are a nation founded on doing what no one else dared to do and no one aspired to do.

“At that some level, that’s what this whole company, what UFC has been. Mixed Martial Arts is not new. It’s been around for 30, maybe 35 years. No rules, no structure. I remember the early fights, I used to watch them back in the day, you could a 170 Brazilian Jiu Jitsu guy fighting a 250 pound heavyweight who was a striker. The rules weren’t clarified. Dana and the people around him had a vision and that was to create a structure around this company. To give it rules, to define it by weight classes, and it attracted some of the best athletes in the world.

“What Dana has built now is a global company that not so long ago seemed impossible.

“Today, you have one of the most recognizable American sports brands on the planet. It reflects so much of the American spirit and is reflected in this American company.

“Here’s the second point. It truly is the United Nations of fighting. If you think about the number of countries that are represented and I think that roster will continue to grow, I think the number of people and champions from around the world (will) continued to be added. I can tell you about our global reach, the number of foreign leaders that want to come to this is unbelievable. It’s the point where we may have a diplomatic crisis. We can’t bring everybody. Some of them don’t even have a fighter in the fight from their country. They want to come because they are fans of the sport and want to follow it.”

You get the picture. The current US Secretary of State and likely 2028 Republican Presidential nominee is pushing the original Zuffa Myth as part of a government platform.

American taxpayer dollars will soon finance the State Department promoting Ari Emanuel’s sporting ventures so he can turn around and finance the real kind of sporting ventures The King of Hollywood wants to get into.

And all of America’s key politicians are on Ari’s side, too. In the name of diplomacy.

Zach Arnold was right. What is our next prediction? US President Donald Trump wants to end his second term with a negotiated agreement to end the Russia/Ukraine conflict. UFC currently has (dormant) financial ties to Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin’s top financier. What better place to have a peace accord than a UFC event in Moscow near the Kremlin?

I’m sure America’s Ultimate Diplomat can pull this off. In the name of world peace.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com. Contact Zach: fightopinion at protonmail dot com.

“The biggest event we’ve ever had at the White House,” according to the POTUS, happens this Sunday, June 14.

I’m referring to UFC Freedom 250, of course.

The most media buzz in UFC history

This is an unusual card, not just because it’s the second ever UFC held outdoors, one of only a handful held on a Sunday, and only the third to feature 7 or fewer fights, but more importantly, because Dana White and Mark Shapiro claim the UFC’s parent company, TKO, stands to lose $30 million putting it on:

“Losing money is never fun. I did that for quite a few years in the early days, but you have to jump on an opportunity like this, no matter what it costs you,” says White.

Mark Shapiro, the president and COO of TKO, told Wall Street analysts in February that the event will cost the company “upwards of $60 million,” and that it “could move north.” TKO expects to lose about $30 million on UFC Freedom 250, even after securing high-profile sponsorship deals from the likes of Ram Trucks, Crypto.com and Monster Energy.

“I want to be clear about something: We will not profit from the White House event independently. We will not be making money on America’s 250th anniversary,” Shapiro said. “This is an investment for the long term. This is about earned media.

“This is about sampling, new fans, casual viewers, a spectacle on a stage that will ultimately expand our audience, our viewership and our success on Paramount+,” he added. “We see this once-in-a-lifetime stage as a strategic investment to drive subscriber acquisition at Paramount+, massive audience sampling for the UFC overall, and Super Bowl-like earned media across the globe.”

In a recent TNT interview, Dana White claimed that UFC White House will draw as many viewers as the NFL.

“For UFC fans all over the world, this is a very unique experience for everybody. We’re expecting Super Bowl type numbers for this fight.”

I am sure that sales pitch is music to the ears of David Ellison and Paramount, key Ari Emanuel clients.

Based on a search of Google Trends, so far, it’s clear that UFC Freedom 250 has drawn far more media interest for the promotion than literally anything going back to 2004. Sadly, Google Trends doesn’t go back to the 1990s, so there’s no way to tell whether the current hype is bigger than the media firestorm generated by the “human cockfighting” backlash of the original UFC.

Interestingly, while organic Google searches for the event are high, they reflect the promotion’s consistent growth rather than a dramatic jump.

But very little of that media coverage focuses on the actual fight card, or even mentions any of the fighters.

Instead, what we’ve got is the usual Trump 2.0 controversy with Democrats and the media establishment virtue signalling that they are appalled by the ugly vision on the White House lawn, and even falling for Trump’s trolling that “maybe we’ll never take (The UFC Octagon) down.”

And as Luke Thomas points out, the normies are appalled.

And based on the polling, a good deal of that coverage is negative:

According to the White House (via Vanity Fair), “there’s been a monthslong frenzy over access to the June 14 event, with even the capital’s most powerful denizens frantically jockeying for a spot. The White House… has fielded an onslaught of requests from top-dollar donors, lobbyists, and members of Congress clamoring for seats.”

The only surprise is that Texas Senator Ted Cruz hasn’t introduced his version of the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, and that it wasn’t ready for Trump to sign at a UFC White House ceremony. Missed opportunity.

Dana White is front and center, Ari Emanuel is omerta

The face of this circus is UFC CEO Dana White.

The ringleader is TKO chairman Ari Emanuel.

But don’t expect many left-leaning reporters or Democratic pundits to mention his name on cable news or podcasts as they ragebait off of the event.

Talking about Ari Emanuel can be very bad for your career after all.

Dana White, on the other hand, he’s a punching bag for the press and pundits (fittingly, his all-time peak media coverage came in January 2023 when he got caught beating up his wife on video).

The only media afraid of Dana are those last desperate folks still clinging to a “career” in MMA media.

Never fear though, there are plenty of right-leaning political grifters who are using UFC Freedom 250 to draw attention to themselves.

One of them is UFC Middleweight champ Sean Strickland.

Sean Strickland: "I got the call, UFC higher ups called me. They said I'm not Israeli enough to go to UFC 250 Israel edition.

I already bought my plane ticket, we're f*cking going. I'm gonna bring the belt, I'll get a big f*cking bull horn and go right up to the gates... We're gonna do a peaceful protest."

Strickland has managed to combine his on-again, off-again shtick about Israel with a Rampage Jackson-style 24/7 Kick-type social media obsession to keep one-upping himself with a monologue linking Trump, Epstein, and Netanyahu.

Bryce Mitchell has gotten in on the action as well, from the safety of the UFC META APEX in Las Vegas.

The online trolling and grifting have been over the top enough to have gotten many to bite hook, line, and sinker on some pretty wild rumors like Bibi Netanyahu attending the card, or Erika Kirk working as the emcee.

We’ve been aggressively covering Ari Emanuel’s leading role in the UFC and WWE since 2023, and it never ceases to amaze how few people are aware that he owns the UFC and drives the political maneuvering behind the organization.

Ari Emanuel’s preference to keep himself out of the UFC narrative is a key driver of the Zuffa Myth 2.0 - that without Donald Trump, the UFC would have never risen from the ashes when Frank & Lorenzo Fertitta bought the company in 2001.

Without Trump and Atlantic City, there would be no UFC, and therefore Dana White and Donald Trump have had a lifelong bromance and business relationship, which is why UFC is running an event on President Trump’s 80th birthday at the White House.

That’s the slop that Ari wants Democrats to believe, and it’s why Dana White has been selling it so hard on his Endeavor-curated media tour with NPR, Time, Rolling Stone, and a bunch of lesser controlled assets podcasts.

Tim Wheaton posted an excellent screed on the kayfabe Dana and Ari are running on the American public that Donald Trump has been a key ally of the UFC for 25 years:

the narrative is completely false. Donald Trump hosted three UFC events between 2000 and 2001 at his Taj Mahal Casino, the Mark G. Etess Arena. Even during the fledgling era of the UFC, they still hosted 23 events between 2000-2004 with most of these being in the USA. Thus, the UFC was not struggling to find venues to book events even during its worst years.

White is also crediting Trump with helping the UFC with success. Trump hosted the UFC in 2001 yet White goes on to explain that the UFC was on death’s door before The Ultimate Fighter premiere in 2005. Plus, the UFC only sold roughly 3,000 tickets to the Trump-hosted event. While the next event, UFC 32 at the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, not a Trump venue, sold four times that amount with 12,500 tickets. Simply, the UFC did not see any boost from working with Donald Trump. One can see evidence of this, given that they never worked together again after that.

Similarly, Trump did not want the UFC back as he was booking better guests at the casino. Right after the UFC, the Mark G. Etess Arena hosted Luciano Pavarotti, ZZ Top, and P!NK, among others. Simply, Trump did not want them back when he was booking mainstream names.

Wheaton also outlines why Trump suddenly needed the UFC in 2016:

But in 2016, Trump hit the road as a presidential candidate and needed a boost for his masculinity. After all, he was a draft dodger who hung out with The View and Oprah, a coastal elite more associated with daytime television than locker rooms. He was more popular as a feature on the Emmy award show than he was with men.

The UFC opened its doors to help him look tough and they made up a false narrative along the way. He began making appearances cage-side at UFC events, especially in vital swing states such as Florida, with broadcasted walkouts like he was a fighter himself, surrounded by American flags.

During Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign had UFC leader White suggested that Trump change his media approach and instead start interviewing the manosphere. Sitting with live streamers and podcasters, the next era of media. White thanked the new media as he spoke on podium on election night, “I wanna thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, ‘Bussin with the Boys,’ and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan!”

And what does TKO get for backing Trump? Simple: access. The kind of access that lets Ari Emanuel help David Ellison acquire first Paramount and then WBD, which led directly to the UFC’s $7.7 billion Paramount deal.

So how does Ari Emanuel stay out of the UFC White House headlines?

A perfect story encapsulates this maddening dilemma. Recently on Pod Save America, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau talked about receiving an invitation to go to the UFC White House event. The problem is that Ari and Mark apparently invited the wrong Jon Favreau. The other guy, the one who directed Swingers 25 years ago.

Obama’s Favreau did not accept the invitation. Apparently, neither did many other celebrities like The Rock, Mario Lopez, Jared Leto, or Adam Sandler. Just like the exodus of musicians who said no to Freedom 250.

How can people not understand that Ari Emanuel has been running the show? Easy.

First, there is a code of silence about Ari’s involvement. Don’t say his name. He’s the King of Hollywood. Endeavor represents everyone on every side of the table. Job security.

Second, money. Ari Emanuel neutered Jeffrey Katzenberg at the Simon Wiesenthal Dinner in 2024 before taking out Joe Biden (as he bragged to Tina Brown).

In the 2028 US Presidential race, it will be Ari Emanuel’s donations and ability to bundle key financiers that will make or break certain Democratic contenders. (See: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, his brother Rahm Emanuel, and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff.)

Which brings us to point three. A key regional Democratic staffer reminded Zach of a brutal point. Democrats don’t watch the UFC. They don’t want to be associated with cage fighting.

See the recent CNN commentary about the lawn of the White House being turned into the Roman Colosseum with a claw. Therefore, Democrats don’t know anything about the UFC or its audience. They pay no attention to management or who is making the decisions.

It’s why they ignored Ali Abdelaziz and Ric Grenell going to Dearborn, Michigan, for the 2024 US Presidential race to help Donald Trump eke out a win over Kamala Harris.

Therefore, when Democrats find out that it’s Ari Emanuel who is running this circus and is running the UFC White House event, there is serious cognitive dissonance.

How can One of Us be Trump’s enabler? It’s why there was no political blowback to Ari Emanuel cashing in a favor, reportedly by calling President Trump to ask for help in the LiveNation/Ticketmaster case.

Ari Emanuel became a billionaire thanks to UFC & WWE, not because of his Hollywood agencies.

He’s a key man of influence in this Trump 2.0 White House. Emanuel is on pace to make hundreds of millions of dollars in extra personal wealth. He’s also going to be a key player in both the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games and the 2028 US Presidential contest on the Democratic side.

And yet Democrats are whistling past this graveyard in a Great Pretending because they want his Hollywood cash and access to all of his controlled media assets.

Why should Ari Emanuel leap into the spotlight when he can quietly control both the Democratic and Republican parties from the sidelines?

It’s great to be rich. It’s even better when the UFC can piss off over 60% of the country by closely associating with a deeply unpopular Trump, and its owner stays completely out of the headlines.

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded BloodyElbow.com in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.

They had no choice but to settle.

As reported by Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics and Post Wrestling on Sunday afternoon, Vince McMahon & Nick Khan reached a settlement with the Ohio Laborers’ Pension Fund over a WWE shareholder lawsuit in Delaware court for breach of fiduciary duty & breach of loyalty.

Of the many current lawsuits involving Endeavor & TKO, this one by a WWE shareholder appeared to be by far the least menacing. Especially compared to the current UFC antitrust litigation in Judge Richard Boulware’s courtroom. Or the Carl Icahn shareholder derivative lawsuit in Delaware against Silver Lake, Ari Emanuel, and Mark Shapiro for their take-private transaction of Endeavor. Or the current Altshares ETF lawsuit over the same matter in Los Angeles Federal Court. The Altshares ETF legal complaint is by far the most devastating and thorough pleading I’ve read yet against Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro, and Egon Durban.

And yet it turned out to be Endeavor’s acquisition of WWE that has now opened Pandora’s Box for future lawsuits against TKO.

Vince McMahon & Nick Khan were likely going to lose at trial. Their games were exposed by Delaware judge J. Travis Laster in his May 26, 2026, opinion regarding Rule 37(e) evidence spoliation. Thanks to the usage of Signal to auto-delete documents, Judge Laster burden-shifted the responsibility from the plaintiffs onto the defendants to overcome key hurdles by a clear-and-convincing standard.

Our most recent MMA Draw podcast summarized the meat grinder that TKO executives were headed towards.

Vince McMahon & Nick Khan had no choice but to settle. They were facing the risk of both personal and professional liability exposure due to the causes of action alleging intentional torts. Insurance wasn’t likely to cover that kind of legal exposure.

Guess what else is considered an intentional tort? Antitrust violations. It’s why TKO shareholders had to pay the $375M UFC antitrust settlement for the Cung Le class.

We’re about to find out if the thesis that the price of making billions of dollars in America is simply paying a percentage on the back-end in lawsuits, or if there is truly irreparable damage. As the Cung Le settlement proved, TKO shareholders were more than happy to pay a pittance to more than double their stock price.

The WWE shareholder lawsuit proved to be a perfect storm with the right ingredients: a multi-billion-dollar, multi-monopoly fight operation with guaranteed revenues for the next seven years and Hollywood executives who were and remain sloppy about covering up their tracks.

(See: Endeavor and UFC claiming that one of Dana White’s phones was missing because a mystery Ari Emanuel relative may have stolen it, only to come back a couple of months later and tell Judge Boulware’s court that they found the missing phone in an SUV. Judge Boulware is now indicating that he wants Ari Emanuel to testify in July.)

The doomscrollers rightfully believe corporate crime pays in America as long as you are willing to pay the Big Law firms their fair share. I’m not as pessimistic as the doomscrollers regarding TKO. The WWE shareholder lawsuit has inflicted damage on TKO, and I believe that Judge Laster’s Rule 37(e) opinion created a blueprint for current and future lawsuits against TKO.

This WWE shareholder lawsuit was a big loss of face for the past and present TKO powers-that-be.

The four big ways Vince McMahon & TKO lost in the WWE shareholder lawsuit

What was the point of the WWE shareholder lawsuit?

The point of it was to reveal to the public the history of Endeavor’s negotiations to acquire WWE from Vince McMahon and show that the whole thing was an inside job that benefited the Big Club and not WWE shareholders at large.

The plaintiffs made their case thanks to some extremely dubious decisions by the corporate executives involved.

Okay, so what? Ari Emanuel and company may have cheated other rich people. Big deal. They are always involved in conflicts of interest. Rich dealmakers are always trying to screw someone else over. What’s new?

Here’s what skeptics are missing.

Read more

The UFC is at the White House next week. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about that. Before they get there, though, they’ve got a little APEX show to run this weekend. And, despite being totally under the radar, it’s not half bad.

The main event is Belal Muhammad vs. Gabriel Bonfim. Muhammad was the Welterweight champ just over a year ago. And Bonfim has a highlight to rival anyone.

The co-main is Brendan Allen, an important figure in the Middleweight division, taking on the streaking Edmen Shahbazyan. The main card also has Iwo Baraniewski, who might be the most exciting man in MMA right now. He’s got Junior Tafa and they should put on a show.

There’s also Santiago Luna vs. Bryce Mitchell, Edgar Chairez vs. Bruno Silva and Fares Ziam vs. Tom Nolan. Those are all great match-ups.

We’ve looked at all the fights and made our picks. Check those out below.

Last week we all did pretty well. Steph led the way with her 10-2 record. We all hit our lock picks last week, too, which means no one was able to make too much ground on me at the top. If I miss a couple of these, though, I could get bounced down a few rungs. Last week I had Sergei Pavlovich as my lock and he delivered (in about 30 seconds).

See who I’m picking this week, below.

Leader board

UFC Vegas 118 Picks

Belal Muhammad (-112) vs. Gabriel Bonfim (-108)

Picking Muhammad: William Watts, Kristen King, Tim Edwards

Picking Bonfim: Miguel Class, Nate Wilcox, Blaine Henry

Brendan Allen (-192) vs. Edmen Shahbazyan (+250)

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NEWS ALERT: Las Vegas Federal Judge Richard Boulware is expected to order UFC matchmakers Sean Shelby + Mick Maynard to testify in his courtroom at the end of June regarding Rule 37(e) evidence spoliation hearings. This is regarding missing and erased phones, e-mails, and other discovery not produced by TKO & Endeavor in current UFC antitrust litigation. These court hearings are anticipated to be in a similar format to the hearings both Dana White & Hunter Campbell participated in several months ago.

Additionally, TKO CEO Ari Emanuel and TKO COO Mark Shapiro are expected to be ordered to testify in July.

Today’s court hearing with Judge Boulware is extremely timely given the subject matter of today’s MMA Draw podcast.

If you find yourself bewildered by the bromance behind UFC White House organizers, you’re not alone.

This week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast is all about piercing through the Hollywood constructs to fill you in on what is happening behind the scenes. The political angles, marketing, and questionable decisions as to why UFC has focused so little on promoting an actual fight card.

Stories like President Trump’s no fat soldiers policy for UFC White House, Trump acquiring TKO stock and his profit motives, and the new Zuffa Myth about how Dana White & President Trump are lifelong business partners responsible for the rise of UFC from the ashes.

What are the true motives by Ari Emanuel & Mark Shapiro in regards to risk/reward calculations for UFC’s brand moving forward in the rest of President Trump’s second term?

The Fighting Life

Is the UFC prepared for the backlash to its White House event?

So a weird thing happened last week and it exposed a blind spot in my thinking that I am going to attribute to having my brain gradually melted by 20(!!) years of covering fight sports for living…

Read more

15 days ago · 516 likes · Ben Fowlkes

For our paid subscribers, we have analysis of recent Delaware sanctions against TKO regarding Endeavor’s acquisition of WWE.

Brandon Thurston has done an excellent job reporting on this story. Access his Substack articles right here.

Delaware judge J. Travis Laster issued an amazing 40-page opinion outlining the history of Endeavor’s acquisition of WWE and the timeline of evidence destruction.

This legal opinion, which you can read here, is truly a piece of history. It is extremely easy-to-understand and digest. Go read it.

However, the media and legal analysis of this opinion has been limited in appreciating the size of scope of the revelations. In other words, the full legal impact of this opinion is not being properly explained. Most of the public comments are cynical in nature and follow the logic that if you have to pay a % of the billions of dollars made, then that’s just part of doing business for the rich & elite.

It’s the wrong way to look at J. Travis Laster’s court opinion and we explain, on this week’s MMA Draw podcast, how you should be looking at his pre-trial ruling.

First, burden shifting. The judge in this case ruled on Rule 37(e) Delaware sanctions for evidence spoliation. It’s similar to Rule 37(e) sanctions under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Judge Laster’s opinion even cites recent Federal case law on the subject matter.

Because of Judge Laster’s sanctions, the burden has shifted from the plaintiffs in the WWE acquisition lawsuit having to prove their claims by a preponderance of evidence to now the defendants having to disprove the plaintiff’s allegations by a clear-and-convincing (75%) standard.

Second, Judge Laster has asserted five facts to be true-until-proven-otherwise. Read his court opinion to see those factual assertions.

There are some unstated ramifications regarding these established facts. Because the lawsuit has causes of actions including breach of fiduciary duty & breach of loyalty, these COAs could be considered intentional (equitable) torts. It means that the defendants could be personally liable for damages not covered by liability insurance or indemnification agreements. Guess what else is considered an intentional tort? Antitrust violations.

What is overlooked by most media outlets: Vince McMahon, Nick Khan, and other key players violated demands to preserve evidence after receiving litigation hold letters from their own attorneys. That’s a key issue at the heart of the current UFC antitrust litigation.

Furthermore, a key claim asserted by Judge Laster deals with how the WWE acquisition process outcome was rigged from the start. What caught our eye was the judge’s assertions about how the Strategic Review Process to oversee Endeavor’s acquisition was an inside job. How so? A consultancy and deal-making firm called The Raine Group was involved in the process. As The New York Times reported in 2016, The Raine Group was an investment firm that Ari Emanuel both co-founded and invested in.

Ari Emanuel was the agent for both Vince McMahon and Donald Trump. He was a co-founder of The Raine Group. He was literally on all-sides of the deal regarding Endeavor acquiring WWE.

Endeavor’s corporate history of Strategic Review Process groups is at the heart of the current Altshares ETF lawsuit in Los Angeles Federal Court regarding Endeavor’s take-private action last year.

This disclosure, along with other secrets that have not been reviewed by various media outlets, makes this week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast a must-listen.

Important News

For our paid subscribers — please update your podcast feeds so that you never miss the latest edition of The MMA Draw podcast.

You can check out The MMA Draw Podcast on Substack via the following feeds:

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast on Apple

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast on Spotify

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast RSS feed

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded BloodyElbow.com in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com. Contact Zach: fightopinion at protonmail dot com.

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The King of McDonald’s reportedly has an ultimatum to anyone in the US military who wants to attend the UFC White House: short and fat people need not apply.

That privilege is for Steven Cheung, who is busy mudslinging with the political pigs.

The man who famously served $5,500 in fast food to college football champions Clemson Tigers and worked a Pennsylvania McDonald’s drive thru in 2024 to show that he’s a man of the American people is reportedly having Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon put out the word about his casting call rules for UFC White House.

This Washington Post headline on Friday tells the story:

If there was ever a headline that perfectly summed up both US President Donald J. Trump and The Kings of Hollywood at TKO, this would be it.

Just like UFC fighters who get limited your-fight-only tickets at the APEX warehouse and WWE talent who reportedly pay for their own tickets to attend events, American soldiers will have to pay their own way to see the circus at UFC White House.

Ari Emanuel & Mark Shapiro view WWE & UFC content through the lens of filming a live Hollywood action movie in a ring or cage as the sound stage. If talent wants to get pushed, they'd better look the part, have a huge social media following, and work for below-market value.

Image is everything. It’s a surface-level version of Vince McMahon’s old “airport test” in judging the social appeal of wrestlers. If you can walk through an airport and stand out like an attraction, you always had a chance of keeping your job in WWE.

As for the powers-that-be in the Trump 2.0 White House, they might be fat or stressed out, but they don’t want to hang around anyone who is just as fat or fatter. Misery loves company. You have to look the part. It’s why Trump was always obsessed with Chris Christie and his red button Diet Coke jokes. It’s why Trump always hired the hottest attorneys, not the most experienced or qualified (or reportedly ethical). It’s why Trump loves hiring telegenic personalities to represent him in government, like current US Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth.

Yes, Mr. Hegseth is a former soldier with bronze stars from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he won significant favor with President Trump because of his appeal as a morning host for Fox and Friends. One of the raison d’etres for Hegseth’s existence at DOD is to change the image of American soldiers worldwide and fire the fat generals with numerous stars on their chests.

In October of 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent members of the Texas National Guard to Chicago to help President Trump with security over an ICE detention facility. Instead of saying thanks, Pete Hegseth sent some of those Texans packing back home because they were filmed on camera for being too fat.

The image that disgusts Trump, his cabinet, and many Republican voters is that of out-of-shape Washington DC FBI employees kneeling in honor of George Floyd.

The edict: Have American soldiers look as menacing as soldiers at a Chinese Victory Day of Parade or Moscow Victory Day of Parade marching for Putin. \

Remember Trump’s 2025 military parade in Washington DC — on his birthday? Now he’s getting a do-over on his 80th birthday with a much larger spectacle of public interest: UFC White House.

No fat soldiers allowed. According to the publication Military, this isn’t exactly a new policy in Trumpworld. Right before the President’s 2025 Washington DC parade, soldiers at Fort Bragg were reportedly scouted for on-camera appearances based on their looks.

When Donald Trump criticizes fat people, the President thinks he’s cutting a promo like Scott Steiner.

The same people in the Trump administration who were laser-focused on soldiers losing their jobs over not taking the COVID vaccine perhaps wish they could inject a bunch of GLP-1 shots to lower some BMI numbers. I’m sure our favorite President could find a way to cash in on Novo Nordisk stock and options.

Oh, look over there. President Trump reportedly bought some TKO stock recently. That’s the shiny laser pointer the American media will chase. It’s their permission slip to talk about a previously existing narrative of Trump family greed and prevarication, but only in a modified limited hangout. Just as long as you don’t say Ari Emanuel’s name and role in this Trump 2.0 White House, everyone’s cool.

That’s the running punchline. The Great Pretending. President Trump, who hates fat people, is a fast-food addict. Dana White, who struggles to make Instagram videos announcing upcoming UFC fights, is suddenly one of America’s actively great and true visionaries.

Dana White, our favorite brand ambassador, is large and in charge at UFC, according to a flood of mainstream media interviews and NPR podcasts over the last month, despite Mr. White’s admitting under oath in Judge Richard Boulware’s courtroom that he has only a limited day-to-day role at the UFC.

What’s the big deal? What’s your problem?

Hey, nobody is getting hurt by having this wonderful celebration on Donald Trump’s 80th birthday at the UFC White House event. This is all about having pride in America, right?

If the organizers truly believed the public bought into that spin, Endeavor wouldn’t be spending so much time curating a brand-new Zuffa Myth. No, not the one about the previous UFC ownership inventing the Unified Rules and “cleaning up” the sport and introducing weight classes and running towards regulation.

This brand new Zuffa Myth, largely unquestioned by mainstream media in 2026, is that Dana White and Donald Trump were always bros who supported each other.

“You can’t tell the story of UFC’s rise without Trump.”

Perfectly timed, Lavie Margolin recently wrote a book separating fact from fiction on this supposedly real bromance.

The overarching point of this political and branding exercise is to justify a UFC White House event that will require a whole lot of taxpayer cash spent deploying government assets for security to protect the fighters, politicians, celebrities, and rich donors who will be in attendance for Trump’s birthday bash on the White House lawn.

Trump has built a lifetime fortune on pushing visual persuasion. Fat people are losers who demonstrate little self-respect. Everything gold-plated signifies an excess of wealth. If you build it, they will come. Trump understands the number one principle of the fight business. Put on the circus and watch everyone flock to it. You can obsess over a data room or elevator pitch a boardroom on your next big business concept; in the end, humans flock to fights like moths flying toward an open flame.

The thing is, people aren’t all that into this UFC White House event. Yet.

The gamble is that visual persuasion will take over. The gamble is that the power of Ari Emanuel & his minister of finance Egon Durban (Silver Lake) will steamroll the public into persuading them to subscribe to Paramount Plus to watch this circus. For Larry & David Ellison’s sake, they better hope that’s the case.

Never gamble against TKO under this current Trump Administration. Despite four significant headwinds that will eventually crash this political party, the UFC & WWE machine is firing on all cylinders. TKO had a blockbuster weekend in Monterrey with the El Grande Americano mask vs. mask match and their Clash in Italy event with a red-hot crowd.

UFC White House represents the perfect distillation of the concentration of American political power and financial wealth. The level of back-scratching between Donald Trump, Ari Emanuel, and Larry Ellison is something we truly have never seen at this kind of size and scope.

Have you noticed the number one talking point about UFC White House isn’t about the actual fight card itself?

As the hype machine for the White House fights ramps up next week, a lot of people who are currently skeptical or neutral about this event — like Joe Rogan — will suddenly find themselves facing an urge to cheerlead something they initially didn’t care about or were repulsed by.

Fall in line… and don’t get fat.

That’s the power of TKO. That’s the power of bread and circuses.

“Life is a gimmick, if you think about it, right? But it’s a good gimmick. It’s something that will never happen again.”

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com. Contact Zach: fightopinion at protonmail dot com.

The UFC is back this weekend and, if you’re like me, you’ve got to get up early in the morning on Saturday to watch it. UFC Macau follows the trend of the UFC putting on shows during local prime time. That means, if you’re on the east coast of North America, the prelims start at 4 a.m. ET and the main card goes live at 7 a.m. ET.

I’m not complaining. I love these shows being over before lunch time.

The main event for this one is somewhat interesting. It’s Song Yadong vs. Deiveson Figueiredo. Both men are coming off high profile losses and both will need a stunning moment to get themselves close to the title picture.

The co-main is Zhang Mingyang vs. Alonzo Menfield. This is the UFC’s second attempt at making Zhang a bankable Chinese star (after he flubbed his lines against Johnny Walker in Shanghai). The main card also has Sergei Pavlovich vs. Tallison Teixeira, Alex Perez vs. Sumudaerji and Jake Matthews vs. Carlston Harris. Not bad.

Angela Hill gets buried on the prelims here. That’s despite her meeting former ONE champion Xiong Jinglan (who went 2-1 against Angela Lee).

We’ve got our picks below. At the last event everyone did OK, other than me! Despite that I managed to stay in first place. That’s because I used my lock pick on Tommy Gantt and resisted the urge to go for Jaqueline Cavalcanti (where many of friends put their pick). The gap is closing, though. Miguel is right on my tail.

Scroll down to see who we are picking this week.

Check out we are picking at this week’s events below.

Leader board

UFC Macau Picks

Song Yadong (-600) vs. Deiveson Figueiredo (+440)

Picking Song: Tim Edwards, Miguel Class*, Stephie Haynes*, Nate Wilcox*, Blaine Henry, Kristen King

Picking Figueiredo:

Alonzo Menifield (+215) vs. Zhang Mingyang (-265)

Read more

The cover of TIME Magazine may not be the mighty cultural monolith that it was 30 years ago, but this is still pretty iconic for UFC CEO Dana White.

Dana’s TIME feature is part of a media blitz Dana is doing that also included a chat with NPR host Steve Inskeep, a Rolling Stone feature interview, and an appearance on The New Yorker’s politics podcast.

It’s interesting to watch the WME Group Flywheel in action, even if, in this instance, it’s a pretty routine “big star does major MSM outlets to promote a high-profile event” media tour rather than something more subtle.

Ironically, talking to MSM reporters who are new to the UFC beat is always a gimme for Dana. He has about as much chance of getting a tough question from NPR as he does from the Nelk Boys.

There’s no better platform for a repeat of the Zuffa Myth (or the new “Donald Trump was the guardian angel of the early UFC” myth) than a large audience MSM platform hosted by a credulous talking head who wants to do a puff piece and move on down the road.

When the MSM gets tough, Dana gets uncomfortable

This doesn’t always work, though, as we saw when Dana guested on The Breakfast Club with Charlamagne tha God and got serious pushback for “glazing” President Trump:

And it got even worse for Dana when Charlamagne asked him about the infamous New Year’s Eve 2022 brawl between Dana and his wife that got captured on video and released by TMZ:

Charlamagne: If a UFC fighter was caught on camera.

Dana White: It's happened.

Charlamagne: Oh, it's happened?

Oh, God. And that's why you- I wonder would they have been treated the same way.

Dana: You know what's funny is that, it's not funny, but I used to say that you don't recover from those. Those are ones you don't recover from.

Charlamagne: But you did.

Dana: I did.

Charlamagne: Do you think being the boss protected you from consequences that employees or athletes-

Dana: No, definitely not.

Charlamagne: No, definitely, Dana, come on.

Dana: Listen, there's a board of directors. There's other people that are involved that could have pushed for (Dana to step aside). But yeah, I think that, and obviously they think too, it would have hurt the company more if I did step away.

Oof. I’m sure whoever booked that interview for Dana got to hear about this one later.

Dana working for POTUS Trump

But let’s get to the TIME Magazine piece. The whole thing is a must-read for Dana White watchers, but the only quotes from the story that are essential for our purposes are these very revealing bits about how Dana White successfully works over US President Donald Trump on behalf of TKO sponsors:

After the UFC announced it had signed a sponsorship deal with Bud Light that fall, critics on the right hammered White. At the time, many conservatives were rebelling against Bud Light for partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a customized beer can. White appealed to Trump, making the case that Anheuser-Busch wasn’t some woke company, but in fact a staunch supporter of first responders, military families, and farmers. In a February 2024 Truth Social post, Trump parroted many of White’s talking points. “Anheuser-Busch is a Great American Brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance?” Trump wrote. The blowback subsided. “I think I’d support him for anything,” says Trump now. “Smart guy, very smart guy, and he’s going to do the right thing.”

And also the parts about how Dana worked for Trump’s second election in 2024:

Going into the 2024 election, White helped broker appearances for Trump on shows popular with young men, connecting him with the Nelk Boys; Will Compton and Taylor Lewan of Bussin’ With the Boys; Adin Ross; Theo Von.
…
Then White caught the big kahuna. For eight years, he had been asking Joe Rogan, who’s been calling UFC bouts since 2002, to have Trump guest on his wildly influential podcast. Finally, Rogan relented: Trump spent three hours with Rogan in October 2024, a conversation that now has more than 62 million views on YouTube.

While on a flight to Mar-a-Lago the day before the election, White says he was “blowing up” Rogan’s phone, trying to get him to publicly endorse Trump. “I was grinding on that thing right down to the last minute,” he says. That night, at a rally in Pittsburgh, Trump announced the news: Rogan had backed him. During his election-­night victory celebration, Trump called White to the podium. “Dana! Dana! Dana!” Trump’s supporters yelled.

And finally, some key details on the upcoming UFC White House event in a couple of weeks:

UFC staffers have made more than a dozen planning visits to D.C. in the past three months; the organization is installing temporary seats on the South Lawn and will have to foot the bill for damaged grass. The UFC will bring in an 87-ft. canopy to light the Octagon, more than double the height of a typical UFC grid. White insisted on the extra room to ensure that nothing obstructs the White House TV shot.

White says the UFC will lose approximately $30 million on the event.

It will be interesting to see if the bosses of TKO come to regard UFC White House as another one of Dana’s expensive follies, like the Fall 2024 UFC 306 event held at the Las Vegas Sphere, which went $20 million over its production budget, leading TKO to bring in Turki Alalshikh to drop 8 figures for a Riyadh Season sponsorship of the card.

I’m also curious if anyone in the TKO or WME C-Suites are reading Trump’s current polling numbers with younger voters — i.e., the UFC fanbase — because I’m not sure a savvy trader would go $30 million long on a guy who is polling at 30% with the key customer demo.

But it seems like they’re all-in with Trump, as we can see from Dana’s aggressive pushing of a new Zuffa myth that Trump was a key early ally of the UFC when Dana and the Fertittas first took it over.

Luke Thomas recently put that spin on blast, but that hasn’t stopped many others from credulously repeating it ad nauseam.

The “Trump was a huge early backer of the UFC” myth is used as the explanation for Dana White’s abandoning the UFC’s long-held policy of political neutrality in 2016.

Former UFC PR head Ant Evans rebutted those claims on X:

Former head of UFC PR here.

Trump's name didn't appear in a single press release, one-sheet briefing, talking point, UFC-produced document, book, or piece of content before 2016.

The only time I recall his name being mentioned within my own earshot was execs laughing about his involvement with the money-pit that was Affliction MMA.

This narrative is simply false.

Is the UFC monopoly a necessary and good thing?

And speaking of false narratives, this embedded video below has been getting quite a bit of play online, and I really need to say something about it. It’s a smart mark MMA fan doing a car blog, lecturing other fans for being ungrateful about UFC’s current contributions to our favorite sport.

Some key quotes:

I Am Saturday: The MMA industry period would not exist or at least not have the success that it does without the UFC (monopolizing the sport) point blank period.

As a sport, MMA would be right now boxing, which is an utter shitshow, an utter shitshow, if they did not wipe out all competition and create a unified league feel, which they’ve done.

There needed to be some sort of monopoly in order to grow the sport to the point where it’s at right now this is the same thing as blaming the NFL for quote-unquote monopolizing football or the MLB for monopolizing baseball baseball or the NBA or any other major promotion or association or league.

Let’s not harp on the idea that the UFC is the villain here. They’re not. They’re the reason the sport exists.

First off, the UFC leapt into the American mainstream via the success of The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV in 2005.

That was long before Zuffa monopolized the sport.

In 2005, the UFC wasn’t even the top MMA promotion in the world.

That honor belonged to PRIDE and its main competitors in Japan (as in the US, MMA’s peak in that country occurred when multiple successful promoters were competing).

For several successive years in the 2000s, Pride, K-1 Dynamite, and Antonio Inoki all put on massively successful cards that were broadcast on Japanese network television and drew millions of viewers, including a record 54 million viewers for Bob Sapp vs. Sumo legend Akebono Tarō on K-1’s 2003 Dynamite card.

Sadly, corruption allegations linking MMA promoters to Japan’s criminal yakuza organizations brought the golden age of Japanese MMA to an end in 2007 when the promoters lost their network TV deals, and PRIDE sold out to Zuffa.

MMA Weekly recently paid tribute to the 19th anniversary of the infamous Roppongi Hills press conference with Dana White & Lorenzo Fertitta in Japan:

In the U.S., the UFC’s years of most rapid growth (2005-2010) occurred in an atmosphere of fierce competition that saw Elite XC draw millions of eyeballs on CBS with star attractions Kimbo Slice and Gina Carano while the UFC was doing banner business on PPV and Spike TV.

After Affliction MMA and Elite XC collapsed, the UFC’s 2011 purchase of Strikeforce ended the era of competitive MMA in the U.S.

All of the major TV viewership records set by the UFC on Spike TV (10 million viewers for The Ultimate Fighter episode featuring Kimbo Slice vs Roy Nelson) or Elite XC on CBS stood unmatched by the UFC until this year, when the sport returned to CBS.

The UFC’s pay-per-view numbers indeed peaked in the 2014-2016 Conor McGregor/Ronda Rousey era, but the sport of MMA was plenty mainstream and successful in the US between 2005 and 2010, long before Zuffa attained a monopsony on MMA talent for the UFC in 2011.

Sorry for the long history lesson, but the point is, no, MMA is not better because the UFC monopolized it.

MMA had plenty of big box office attractions and business before the UFC monopolized the sport after PRIDE’s death.

UFC has made billions of dollars while distributing less than 20% of revenues to fighters. The vast majority of the profit went right into the pockets of our favorite casino owners and the Kings of Hollywood. Today’s sport, in the cage or outside of it, doesn’t capture the same emotion or drama that it once used to.

Which means you are left arguing about commercial success. Lots of people know what UFC is. That awareness is a mile wide and an inch deep. It does not mean the sport is in a better place.

Adam Kovacs recently argued that we are in the beginning stages of a combat sports boom, thanks to institutional financial support of TKO and the rise of influencer promotions.

In this so-called “attention economy,” maybe MMA is currently successful. But that completely ignores the previous record-breaking ratings that MMA drew a generation ago on broadcast TV.

The most irritating part about This Is Saturday’s case for fans to support the UFC monopoly on MMA is the way he conflates the UFC with leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB.

First off, all of those sports leagues present players with over a dozen billion-dollar entities that could potentially bid for their services. The NFL is a cartel with many owners, the UFC is a promotion with a single owner.

The major sports leagues got antitrust exemptions from the U.S. government in part for this reason, but also because their athletes are unionized and protected by collective bargaining provisions in their contracts.

That’s why the TKO is lobbying for the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act to act as a quasi antitrust exemption when paired with arbitration and class action waivers.

Having seen the quality of the UFC product decline relentlessly after a decade of WME/TKO ownership, I see no reason for fans to do Dana White’s job for him.

That’s not only because he hasn’t been a good steward for the sport, but more importantly, it’s because Dana allows himself to be used as a rodeo clown for the TKO brass.

Dana White out there soaking up media attention takes some political heat off of Donald Trump, and also, Dana taking the spotlight means his boss Ari Emanuel can keep his distance from MAGA while remaining close to the President.

That relationship comes in mighty handy when Ari needs to lobby Trump on behalf of Ticket Master or help out a friend like David Ellison get Trump’s support for the creation of the Paramount-WBD media empire.

And Dana White might be a bit of a bumbling and hapless spokesman (check him out trying to use ChatGPT to bust Eddie Hearn’s chops, but falling prey to the hallucination-prone AI machine instead), but with the WME/TKO flywheel running, that’s fine.

Meanwhile, the MSM is only too happy to engage in a Great Pretending that Dana is the sole mastermind behind the UFC. Sure, he’s involved, but the UFC machine runs without him. Yet we are presented with article after article pretending that Dana White is the sole driver of the UFC machine. It’s the worst kind of Pravda narrative imaginable.

And if Trump’s incompetence and corruption lead to a dramatic collapse in his support, the TKO brass can always dump Dana and find a new clown to put in front of the circus.

Nate Wilcox is the Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded Bloody Elbow in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Like everyone else, we watched the Oleksandr Usyk vs. Rico Verhoeven fight… but we came away with a bunch of positives rather than negatives.

The UFC wanted Rico Verhoeven but for a much lower price than Turki Alalshikh paid for the famous GLORY kickboxer to fight at the Pyramids in Egypt. With Verhoeven’s outstanding showing against the lineal boxing heavyweight champion, he now has several boxing and MMA opportunities in 2026 and 2027 should he choose to pursue them. Like a major fight against the lineal Heavyweight MMA champion, Francis Ngannou.

This week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast is all about non-UFC options opening up in the combat sports landscape. It’s not about competing with UFC — it’s about grabbing a % of the market share without copying the Donn Davis PFL playbook. It’s about snatching the easy money that Mark Shapiro and TKO management is leaving on the table. There is money to be made. It requires some creativity. Avoid overthinking and laziness and there’s room to grab some cash.

MVP’s entry into MMA on Netflix plus the return of Scott Coker means that the PFL has some assets that could prove to be valuable to a non-UFC entity. Who wants to make a deal first?

Our podcast reviews the current state of affairs. Is Scott Coker simply collecting another paycheck like his industry detractors on Twitter claim? Is there room for a tournament format in 2027? Can RIZIN grow American market share with a co-promotional venture with Scott Coker?

For our paid subscribers, we have a list of six dos — and don’ts — that all new boxing and MMA promoters should pay close attention to. We’re not rocket scientists at fight promotion but we do observe clear mistakes that can be easily be avoided and pathways for opportunity in building new relationships. Remember the golden days of MMA fandom which felt more like a community rather than a networking transaction with Crypto Bros and Korean stock day-traders?

If anything, recent industry developments are interesting and that’s what we really care about. So should you. Now is not the time for fatalism and learned helplessness.

Important News

For our paid subscribers — please update your podcast feeds so that you never miss the latest edition of The MMA Draw podcast.

You can check out The MMA Draw Podcast on Substack via the following feeds:

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast on Apple

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast on Spotify

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast RSS feed

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded BloodyElbow.com in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.

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Why is TKO concentrating so much power, not only in the fight industry but general sports business as well?

We wanted to answer that question on this week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast.

Building off of our TKO Top 10 Power Players in 2026 podcast, this week’s podcast is all about the mechanics and financing that powers the TKO multi-monopoly machine behind UFC & WWE.

We earlier identified who is behind TKO. Now we want to identify the parts of the flywheel that act as multipliers to feed this financial monster.

Here’s a short preview of what is covered on this week’s podcast:

• What are the different components of TKO? (e.g., WME Group, IMG, OnLocation, Everpass, etc.)

• Who are the key financiers that cycle capital in and out of TKO and help refinance debt? We take a special look at the role of Goldman Sachs, Redbird Capital, and Silver Lake.

• How TKO utilizes conflicts of interest to sideline the competition and be on all sides at the negotiating table

• How one monopoly feeds other monopolies and concentrates ownership wealth. A prime example of this is Egon Durban’s rapid expansion as minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders football. The news of Ari Emanuel & Mark Shapiro getting ownership slivers of the Raiders broke after our podcast recording.

Disgruntled fans of both UFC & WWE have a right to complain. They should also understand that they are guinea pigs for the Kings of Hollywood who want to redirect combat sports cash into more lucrative and prestigious ventures like the NFL. It’s a lot easier to sell NFL ownership at a cocktail party in the Hamptons than to hype yourself up as a combat sports carnival barker.

Important News

For our paid subscribers — please update your podcast feeds so that you never miss the latest edition of The MMA Draw podcast.

You can check out The MMA Draw Podcast on Substack via the following feeds:

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast on Apple

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast on Spotify

• The MMA Draw Substack Podcast RSS feed

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded BloodyElbow.com in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.

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“Bringing boxing back to the people.”

If you thought the political marriage between Dana White & US President Donald J. Trump creating the UFC White House event was one of the strangest unions ever, I’ve got an even stranger story for you.

A story about how a marketing guy from Wales, who came out of nowhere, conquered the San Francisco political & lobbying class in the backyard of Nancy Pelosi & Gavin Newsom by promising to run the biggest boxing fight in the history of the city.

It’s the perfect kind of story that illustrates the current state of affairs for both boxing and America in 2026. A marriage between combat sports, lobbyists, and world governments. It also demonstrates the raw financial and branding power of Saudi Arabian money. The Riyadh Season campaign is highly influential, and Ed Pereira is living proof of it.

It’s been several months since we’ve written about Ed Pereira, International Man of Mystery, at The MMA Draw.

Who? You’re not alone in asking that question. But it’s a question we’ve spent hundreds of hours investigating over the last six months by interviewing key sources in San Francisco, New York, and London.

Why? Because this is a story about how a complete unknown stranger halfway around the world managed to win the support of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie — currently with a 74% approval rating — and one of the city’s most powerful lobbyists, Chris Gruwell, who represents the Golden State Warriors & San Francisco 49ers.

It is easily one of the 10 strangest stories I’ve encountered in nearly 30 years of writing about combat sports.

If you don’t know San Francisco politics, you’re not alone. But you certainly know quite a bit about how Nancy Pelosi operated as US Speaker of the House and how current California Governor + 2028 US Presidential candidate Gavin Newsom operates. San Francisco is their turf, and it just got seduced by the charms of a UK businessman whom few in boxing have ever heard of.

A July 11th boxing event promising to attract over 130,000 people is now going head-to-head against Conor McGregor’s UFC return to Las Vegas for International Fight Week.

How on earth did San Francisco — and its taxpayers — end up in this position? And who is going to be paying for this?

Where to start?

Ed Pereira’s July 11th San Francisco boxing event has evolved into something very different. This is now a revealing case study about political access, civic branding, Silicon Valley influence, Sovereign Wealth Fund ambition, and the increasingly blurred line between entertainment spectacle and government power.

At the center of this story is Daniel Lurie, a new mayor attempting to rebrand San Francisco as a city on the comeback trail. Mayor Lurie has aggressively promoted sports, nightlife, artistic endeavors, and major public events as symbols of urban recovery after years of negative headlines surrounding homelessness, crime, and downtown decline.

Mayor Lurie’s current popularity matters because Ed Pereira’s event is now directly tied to his political credibility. The Mayor’s endorsement transformed Pereira from a marketing gadfly into a legitimate City Hall-backed boxing entrepreneur almost overnight.

Modern political influence is less about institutional credibility and more about narrative construction. It’s why every hustler at a Venture Capital or Private Equity conference is constantly using the word “storytelling.”

Ed Pereira is selling a perfectly-tailored story for a city desperate to believe in its resurgence.

The game plan? Present himself as a pioneer and visionary capable of delivering a globally significant moment through outrageous ambition and celebrity star power, while moving fast enough to secure City Hall’s endorsement before facing tough questions.

How did this man gain access to the highest levels of San Francisco politics so quickly?

The political power of Turki Alalshikh

The story of Ed Pereira’s adventures from Wales to San Francisco involves riding the wave of Turki Alalshikh’s boxing dreams.

How does someone from Cardiff end up representing Riyadh?

Mr. Pereira’s public narrative is that he was recruited into the world of SELA, a key organizer behind the Kingdom’s major global ventures (SELA owns 60% of TKO’s Zuffa Boxing), due to iVisit Media’s successful branding activation campaigns. Through connections developed in rugby (the Welsh Rugby Union) and football, he was eventually brought in by SELA to help with flyers and digital campaigns for major boxing fights.

Was the Saudi PIF’s ownership of Newcastle United a key bridge for SELA & Ed Pereira to connect?

Mystery number one: What was the name of the person at SELA who made this connection? We spent countless hours investigating and could not produce the specific name of this individual.

The only name we could even guess was Ed Hepworth, a former NBA executive who became the CFO of Six Nations Rugby before transferring over to SELA International as their CFO.

In a written response, Ed Pereira told The MMA Draw that this was not factually accurate.

Whoever introduced iVisit Media to SELA gave Ed Pereira a golden ticket, and he used it to travel to the Golden Gate Bridge. His timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

In January 2025, San Francisco elected Daniel Lurie as its new mayor.

Mayor Lurie ran on a campaign platform promising voters that he would repair the global image of San Francisco’s name and do so in a way that integrated technology to dramatically change the way business is done in the city. San Francisco was open for business.

Turki Alalshikh wanted to run a major boxing event at Alcatraz, the famous Bay Area prison. There was a permitting process with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy agency that SELA needed to navigate. Enter Ed Pereira.

Through records requests produced to the public, San Francisco city e-mails revealed that Ed Pereira managed to hire Dennise Abad as his key navigator. She worked at GGNPC and knew the ins and outs of San Francisco politics. A rare opportunity to hire someone highly organized and qualified.

Then a roadblock emerged. US President Donald Trump wanted to reopen Alcatraz as an active prison at a price tag of $152 million. That slammed the door shut on Turki’s Alcatraz boxing dreams.

While Ed Pereira was rapidly making San Francisco connections, presumably using Turki Alalshikh’s name and Dr. Rakan AlHarthy’s leadership, Pereira was also working with IDEKO and other key power players to organize the May 2025 Times Square boxing event featuring Ryan Garcia.

As Thomas Hauser exhaustively chronicled in The Guardian, SELA’s event in New York was a huge political and logistical battle involving Turki Alalshikh, then-Mayor Eric Adams, the NYPD, and interference from elected leaders on both the state and Federal level.

Ed Pereira and Turki would soon have a falling out, reportedly over a financial dispute. Ed was, however, by no means a loser. He managed to quickly build connections with key individuals, including Bobby McGuire, President of the FDNY Bravest Boxing team. iVisit Media, Ed Pereira’s family company, was building a Rolodex of power players through brand activation events.

Politicians around the world now saw Ed Pereira as associated with Turki and SELA’s boxing activities. That opened up some amazing opportunities. Multiple sources, on background, indicated that Pereira landed on the radar of the New York Yankees. The organization allegedly expressed interest in running an April 2026 fight at Yankee Stadium.

So, why choose San Francisco over New York? Because Pereira had already established inroads in the Bay Area during the Alcatraz negotiations. The Visionary saw a political pathway with minimum roadblocks, and he was exactly correct in his assessment.

Winning over SF City Hall’s gatekeeper

With the wind at his back, Ed Pereira quickly navigated the labyrinth of San Francisco bureaucracy.

One month before the 2025 Times Square SELA boxing event, officials in the San Francisco government included a key and powerful political force in negotiations — Martha Cohen.

Martha Cohen was San Francisco’s special events coordinator for decades.

In 2013, Joe Lacob and Peter Guber pushed to build a new waterfront arena for the Golden State Warriors, years before the franchise began winning NBA championships. To help secure support for the project, the team hired key lobbyist Chris Gruwell, president of Platinum Advisors and former finance chief for Gavin Newsom’s mayoral campaign.

(Platinum Advisors is the same lobbying firm that Frank & Lorenzo Fertitta used in California when they owned the UFC.)

When the Warriors were planning their numerous victory parades, Martha Cohen served as the City’s lead coordinator, overseeing those events.

As this 2023 Mission Local article highlighted, it was Martha Cohen who was a key figure in charge of preparing San Francisco to host APEC — the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation. This was the famous business summit in which then-President Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping.

Government officials I spoke with had few worries that the city could throw a big party. Several mentioned Martha Cohen by name. The city’s special projects director is described as “old-school competent” and has World Series parades and civic extravaganzas on her resume: “When she retires, they’re gonna have, like, five people replace her,” says a former mayoral staffer. “The logistics of it, I’m not concerned about.”

San Francisco’s image of decaying public streets, filthy from human waste and drug use haunted the political class. SF City Hall managed to power-wash the streets and move the homeless temporarily into indoor facilities for the November 2023 summit.

Key word: temporary. Weeks after the APEC summit, the streets were dirty again.

Martha Cohen did her job — and kept it. Then-Mayor London Breed did not — and lost hers.

In 2024, she lost the SF Mayoral election to Daniel Lurie.

The new mayor promised to clean up the streets of San Francisco, establish law & order, integrate new technology to modernize the way the city did business, and bring big cultural events to the city.

Winning over Martha Cohen and playing into Mayor Lurie’s new political agenda was the perfect scenario for Ed Pereira to establish a foothold at City Hall.

Documents produced via public records request revealed that Ed Pereira went right to work and engaged in multiple meetings with Martha Cohen after the May 2025 Times Square SELA boxing event.

Ed Pereira scored big political connections.

• Pereira got Martha Cohen on his side, winning over institutional power at City Hall.

• Pereira found the perfect SF Mayor in Daniel Lurie to push the Mayor’s agenda with a mutually appealing dream.

• Pereira scored an alliance with one of the City’s most powerful permitting contractors and event organizers, Kyle Meyers of Silverback.

iVisit Media lined up all the key political and logistical human components to sell a plan that the man who calls himself “a pioneering visionary and marketing genius” was ready to pitch to the world as a non-promoter promoter who could compete with the big boys of boxing.

The world’s biggest boxing event ever… in San Francisco?

Why there? Why now?

The rumors of a January 2026 press conference at Civic Center Plaza to advertise the world’s largest boxing event were shrouded in mystery. I first heard about this press conference a few days before it was scheduled.

That piqued my curiosity and raised huge questions.

A press conference to announce a major boxing event — with a YouTube media rights deal? It was a stunning impression.

SF Mayor Daniel Lurie was in attendance. He bought Ed Pereira’s sales pitch without any reservations.

“Oh my goodness. I am so fired up to see you all to make sure that we see all of these people, 130,000 people on July 11th. Let’s go.

Boxing was and still is a uniting force for our community. Today, we are announcing a partnership that builds on that incredible history. This July, I am so excited that San Francisco will be home to iVisit Boxing, a week-long series of events across San Francisco and the Bay Area, culminating in a historic match right here in our civic center. Every match will be free and open to the public, bringing world-class sport directly to San Franciscans.

This event will also be broadcast globally on Youtube, sharing our city with audiences around the world.

Now, with every world-class event that we bring to San Francisco, Super Bowl 60, MLB Opening Night, the FIFA World Cup, and now iVisit Boxing, our city, it comes to life.”

The other shocking press conference development? YouTube’s logo was plastered everywhere next to iVB’s logo. It was an unmistakable visual message being sent to the public: YouTube was backing iVB Boxing as a partner.

But what was the full story?

Documents produced via public record requests revealed one hell of a sales pitch. A pitch deck advertised YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, Google and YouTube's “senior leadership teams”, and Zuffa Boxing-aligned Andre Ward.

A picture is worth a thousand words. It also explains why SF Mayor Daniel Lurie went all-in on Ed Pereira’s promise of delivering the world’s biggest boxing event.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that organizers were discussing Oleksandr Usyk vs. Deontay Wilder as the headliner. Boxing writer Dan Rafael asked Wilder’s manager, Shelly Finkel, about these rumors, and Finkel categorically denied any negotiations.

The name-dropping of Usyk and Wilder generated tens of thousands of dollars worth of free press in British media outlets such as the BBC, The Daily Mail, and The Sun.

Even The New York Times got into the action.

“Anybody can go and put a show on and just produce it live on their own YouTube channel… but we are doing exactly the same as what the NFL did. This partnership with YouTube puts us in the next league.”

Pereira told the San Francisco Chronicle that iVB and YouTube had a media rights agreement.

“It would be ridiculous if I had gone and put the YouTube logos all over my press conference, and internationally because we are running an international campaign, and YouTube wouldn’t have signed it off,” Pereira said. “My fights will be on YouTube, there will be 12 of them, the world will see. And I’m really excited that YouTube chose us to be their partner in this.”

Pereira said he plans to reveal more about the deal with YouTube at a later date.

Thanks to the branding power of Riyadh Season and SELA’s Times Square event, Ed Pereira managed to navigate his way through San Francisco City Hall. Then he promised the moon and the stars about producing the biggest boxing event in world history.

How much due diligence was conducted by City Hall? Who was going to say no when you could say yes and use the incredible visual of a World’s Fair-type event to sell the revitalization of San Francisco?

Meet Mr. Fixer

Ed Pereira lined up many of San Francisco’s key political players: Martha Cohen. Mayor Lurie. Chamber of Commerce CEO Rodney Fong. Kyle Meyers of Silverback. And one other really important fixer: top city lobbyist and current California State Athletic Commission board member Chris Gruwell.

The same Chris Gruwell who was Gavin Newsom’s SF Mayoral campaign finance manager. A top SF lobbyist with key connections to Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Joe Lacob (Golden State Warriors), and Jed York (San Francisco 49ers).

The San Francisco Standard named Gruwell in a March 2026 article as one of the city’s top two lobbyists. In a separate Standard article, the publication also labeled Gruwell as one of San Francisco’s most powerful labor lobbyists.

Recently updated May 2026 lobbying records tell the story about the scope of Chris Gruwell’s powerful client list.

An April 2025 Politico California political and tech meet-up with SF Mayor Daniel Lurie featured some heavy hitters from Silicon Valley — and Chris Gruwell.

If Mayor Lurie is invested in a major city project, odds are that Chris Gruwell is carefully watching what City Hall is up to. Nobody has better intelligence.

The San Francisco Chronicle quoted Gruwell’s support for Ed Pereira’s boxing event by stating: “The California State Athletic Commission applauds Mayor Daniel Lurie’s vision in making San Francisco a destination for world-class sporting events.”

The significance of Gruwell’s involvement is a clear demonstration that Pereira’s boxing venture penetrated the upper layers of San Francisco’s political infrastructure.

Much to our surprise, Mr. Gruwell recently made an appearance at the scales for the Ronda Rousey/Gina Carano weigh-ins for the MVP MMA event on Netflix. Fight Hype posted a video.

Chris Gruwell loves being part of the action. He’s now using combat sports to shift from behind-the-scenes to an on-camera public persona.

Right after Ed Pereira’s January 2026 Civic Center press conference, Mayor Lurie and Chris Gruwell appeared with state legislative representative Matt Haney at Abaddon Fight Club. View that video on Instagram. Haney is a key politician for Athletic Commission business in the Sacramento legislature.

Chris Gruwell built his reputation by helping projects such as the Salesforce Tower and Chase Center navigate city government approval. Aligning yourself with someone who carries that level of credibility in San Francisco politics signals seriousness to key decision-makers. An event like Ed Pereira’s boxing bonanza requires permits, regulatory coordination, political goodwill, law enforcement cooperation, labor support, public relations backing, and media amplification.

It’s one big club, and you ain’t in it. But Ed Pereira is.

Ed Pereira won over San Francisco’s political and lobbying class by promising to deliver the biggest possible sporting event outdoors and do so with an unforgettable visual scene. It has proven to be Ed’s marketing hook and his best layer of security for political protection.

There is just one little challenge.

His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs

In multiple conversations with individuals who have interacted with iVisit Media, Ed Pereira’s family business, there is a high level of respect regarding the aggressiveness and sharpness of the company’s young employees in executing various brand activation campaigns.

One source in particular claimed that Ed and his father, Eduardo, operate a business in a relationship similar to Barry and Eddie Hearn. Many iVisit staffers are supposedly in their early twenties, fresh out of university, and work remotely from countries such as India, Argentina, and Italy.

The energy required to solicit new advertising business is intense. Burnout is very real. Advertising is a great business if you have repeat clients, especially if a company like iVisit Media has a prospective golden goose like SELA.

But client retention and payment collection are often challenging. Losing SELA after the Times Square boxing event hurt. With AI on the march, advertising margins are compressing.

According to recent UK Companies House records, iVisit Media significantly increased its cash inflows but also saw a rise in its short-term liabilities.

The advertising business is not a business for the faint of heart.

One month after the January 2026 San Francisco iVB Boxing press conference, His Majesty's Revenue & Customs in the UK posted an official announcement (via The Gazette) of a wind-up petition filed on February 25, 2026, against iVisit Media Ltd.

A wind-up petition is an action by a creditor to try to force the liquidation of a company that owes unpaid debts.

The timeline presented by The Gazette indicated a court hearing scheduled for March 11, 2026.

A few days before that stated court date, Ed Pereira and iVB sponsored an event at The Felt Forum (MSG) in New York for the annual FDNY vs. NYPD boxing exhibition. The International Battle of the Badges. The event was streamed live on YouTube with Ed Pereira and Dan Canobbio as presenters.

The quick backstory on how this deal initially began: At the 2025 Times Square SELA boxing event, Ed Pereira met with Bobby McGuire of the FDNY Bravest Boxing team at a rooftop party. A year later, iVB was sponsoring the FDNY’s charitable combat sports endeavor.

What was the outcome of the supposed March 11, 2026, High Court date? There was an adjournment, and a new court date is apparently scheduled for July 1st.

When we asked Mr. Pereira — in writing — to respond to the HMRC wind-up petition presented in The Gazette, this was his on-the-record response.

“Firstly, you are referring to iVisit Media Ltd in the question above. The event in SF and any IVB event world wide has nothing to do with iVisit Media Ltd.

Secondly, to clarify, the events are being put on by IVisit Media Inc out of California.”

We checked the Secretary of State records in California and found a Delaware corporation called iVisit Media Inc., domiciled in Los Angeles in October 2025.

Selwyn Gerber is a CPA and Chartered Accountant. He’s the secretary of this US subsidiary.

Which begs an obvious question: if iVisit Media Ltd is under a wind-up petition with HMRC in the UK, where is the money coming from to pay for the July 11th San Francisco event under the auspices of iVisit Media Inc.?

We certainly know Ed Pereira is spending money on boxing celebrities to endorse his July 11th event. Ed’s next magic act involved a fellow Uruguayan on a yacht.

Stylin’ and profilin’ with Sampson Lewkowicz

After promising to deliver over 130,000 spectators for Civic Center Plaza on July 11th, Ed Pereira rented a yacht at Pier 33 in San Francisco to deliver a press conference with some interesting boxing and global celebrities.

In his own press release, Ed Pereira reaffirmed his commitment to breaking the world’s attendance record for a boxing event.

A pioneering visionary and marketing genius, Ed Pereira, CEO of iVB says he’s targeting a world record audience of more than 132,135 fans (record set by Tony Zale vs Billy Pryor at Juneau Park in Milwaukee in 1941), the largest crowd ever assembled for a boxing event.

“This will be a show like the boxing world has never seen before,” said Pereira, “an event built for this city and its communities. San Francisco has always been a city that stands for something special, and on July 11, it will stand at the center of the boxing world.”

To do this, Ed Pereira assembled a team led by Sampson Lewkowicz and veteran California promoter Paco Damian. Ed swapped out ring announcer Lupe Contreras in favor of Jimmy Lennon Jr. and brought in Christy Martin and Sky Sports boxing personality Andy Clarke. ESPN host and former Broadway Boxing PBP man Brian Custer will have the call on July 11th.

Despite sounding Welsh, Ed Pereira — like Sampson Lewkowicz — is Uruguayan. A unique bond.

So, what kind of fight card would Sampson be able to assemble to attract 130,000 spectators in San Francisco on July 11th, head-to-head against Conor McGregor’s UFC return?

Anthony Olascuaga, the current WBO World Flyweight champion promoted by Japanese office Teiken Boxing Gym, will face Andy Dominguez from Larry Goldberg’s Boxing Insider Promotions in Atlantic City. Dominguez is managed by Vizhier Mooney, a former Nike PR executive for the Jordan Brand who is married to former Nike, Disney, and Fender executive Andy Mooney.

Remember the earlier promises that Oleksandr Usyk would appear at the July 11th event? Ed Pereira recently told Playbook Boxing to forget about it. Now he has a real main event Americans will care about.

“Everybody knows we had conversations with Usyk. We all know the truth. There are powers that be at the moment that have set the finances to a point where, realistically, it couldn’t make money.”

“We went into those conversations, it didn’t work out. It doesn’t mean that it won’t work out in the future. It just didn’t work out.”

“But one thing that I can guarantee is that we’re going to have more people in San Francisco watching boxing than [Anthony Joshua] will have in Riyadh watching him, and that’s the truth. And possibly more than Usyk will have in Egypt.”

“If you look at it on the American mindset, nobody knows who Usyk is in America but they definitely know who Olascuaga is.”

Instead of politically backtracking, Chris Gruwell visited Ed Pereira on his yacht presser and doubled down on his support for the July 11th event.

“These things don’t happen easily. A lot of things have to go right. You need a great promoter. You need a city opening its welcoming arms. I want to thank Ed Pereira and his team, who have been closely with our local Mayor Lurie, to bring what’s going to be a world-class event not just to California but to San Francisco. We’re really excited about that.”

This was music to Ed Pereira’s ears. His political allies absorbed his dream as their own. What wasn’t music to Ed’s ears was both Chris Mannix and Steve Kim calling this event boxing’s version of the Fyre Festival.

Multiple sources, on background, are claiming that money is already allocated for the fighter purses and that some of the bouts are allegedly paid fights (either by managers, investors, or other promoters). That is the good news.

Now comes the hard part: Who’s buying tickets for this event?

Following the money

Remember Mayor Lurie’s promise about tickets being free to the public for watching the July 11th event at Civic Center Plaza?

It turns out there are a lot of paid tickets for sale.

Not on Ticketmaster, but with UK vendor Ticket Tailor. Why are tickets being sold by a UK shop? Why isn’t Ticketmaster, AXS, or another vendor like SeatGeek being used?

According to Ticket Tailor’s website, they collect a percentage of fees and then redirect ticket purchases directly to the promoter’s payment processor. They do not handle refunds.

Both California state law (B & P statute 22507) and Athletic Commission rules & regulations are very clear about ticket refund protocols.

And the prices?

General admission tickets for standing range from $60 to $120, with a caveat.

"This ticket grants access to the General Admission Plaza Standing section.

Please note: Areas within the General Admission Standing section may have partially restricted views of the stage and event production.”

If you want to sit at Civic Center Plaza? $175 to start. Prices progressively ramp up into tiers of $650, $1500, $2500, $3500, and $6000.

In a recent IFL TV interview, Ed Pereira claims the most expensive tickets are moving. Focus on his careful wording.

“I know everybody likes to focus on the top end. Yes, we’ve got a $6000 ticket. By the way, they’re mostly, they’ve all pretty much gone. I think I’ve only got a few. The reason why it’s $6000 is you get to eat dinner in City Hall, right? So, that doesn’t happen every day. That’s like super unique. I love Wembley, it’s one of my favorites. I love the Principality, it’s my favorite stadium. But very rarely do people get a chance to love boxing and to eat in City Hall.”

Are the tickets gone because they were sold or removed for the purposes of VIP corporate sponsorship packages for sale?

Transparency is key here. According to Ticket Tailor’s latest seat maps, at least 35-40% of expensive tickets are now off the market.

Is Ed Pereira going to claim that the gate for his boxing event is in the ballpark of Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano? The proof will be in the pudding when he has to pay taxes on ticket sales to the California State Athletic Commission.

The proof on media rights revenue from YouTube (and now TikTok) will also come to the forefront, thanks to UK-based YouTube partner Brave Bison + Boxing News working together for Ed Pereira’s marketing boxing campaign. Show us the money!

Curiously, Ed Pereira is not the promoter of record for this event. Sampson Lewkowicz and Paco Damian are the listed promoters. Promoters are in charge of key financial reporting. And yet iVisit Media is listed on Ticket Tailor as the entity selling event tickets.

It is easy for keyboard warriors to dismiss this Ed Pereira event as a pie-in-the-sky operator. The problem is that apparently no one is looking out for customer and taxpayer rights.

• Who is paying for security costs in the form of private contractors and overtime for San Francisco police officers?

• How much money is required in the form of insurance/bond policies to run this huge show?

• What city and state government contracts or tax credits are involved in publicly financing this event?

This July 11th event is quickly turning into one of the most politically-oriented combat sports events in quite some time. Don’t believe me? Look at the details of the VVIP package that Ed Pereira is marketing for $6000.

Who are these business leaders? Is Chris Gruwell going to make some calls to his clients to appear for this City Hall dinner?

Looking at the big picture

For 99.99% of boxing fans, it would be easy to mock this event. Dismiss it. Laugh at it. Scoff and smile.

The problem is that you cannot easily dismiss this story because of its political ramifications.

A major American city — next door to Silicon Valley — is going all-in on a fantastical adventure that is now going head-to-head against Conor McGregor’s UFC return.

This is a story about the raw branding and financial power of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Not one single Democrat leader in San Francisco politics protested against SELA or Saudi Arabian investment money. How quickly times have changed.

It was Ed Pereira’s proximity to SELA, Turki Alalshikh, and Dr. Rakan AlHarthy that got him through the door of San Francisco’s City Hall.

It is SF Mayor Daniel Lurie — with a 74% approval rating — putting his reputation on the line and willing to spend political capital backing this venture.

It is Chris Gruwell, top lobbyist for Joe Lacob and the 49ers, willing to be so visible and high-profile in his support for this sporting exhibition.

There are lifelong promoters in combat sports who could have only dreamed of ever garnering one-tenth of the political support that Ed Pereira has organized for his July 11th event.

Ed Pereira’s boxing venture has demonstrated a powerful principle about fight sport. Extensive knowledge of boxing is not required to market it. A savvy promoter just needs to know more than the counterparties he negotiates with.

Civic leaders are increasingly competing to host major sports events — and spending large sums of taxpayer cash to do so — because such spectacles generate headlines, tourism narratives, and social media visibility.

Ed Pereira has masterfully leveraged his political connections in San Francisco. They are all glued together like peanut butter & jelly. If Ed Pereira succeeds, they succeed. He will truly emerge as a case study in how perception and networking can generate legitimacy at astonishing speed.

If he fails, the powers that be will scramble for cover, and the focus will inevitably shift to the political figures who helped elevate this project in the first place.

If a concept sounds delightfully promising or maybe even too good to be true, politicians and lobbyists will bite — after all, it’s not their money.

And very few people are asking questions.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.

Netflix’s broadcast of Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano definitely brought in eyeballs based on the amount of online conversation bitching about the 17-second main event.

There’s also this data point from Tapology:

And Ben Fowlkes raised an important point:

That was certainly the case with all the Jabronies screaming “FIX!” and “WORK!” after the main event.

I’m not sure what they expected a 44-year-old Gina Carano to do that a prime Cat Zingano couldn’t.

For reference, check Sherdog’s page for Ronda’s MMA career up to 2015, before her losses to Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes:

MMA Draw contributor William Watts saw strategy in MVP’s booking of the card:

My concern with this cup-half-full take on the show is that if the Netflix audience only showed up for the main and co-main as the live audience did, none of that matters.

Additional thoughts coming out of the show:

1. Was it a mistake to run Los Angeles for a celebrity MMA event, given the history of LA people showing up very late and leaving early (for things like Dodgers games)?

2. Our warning in our preview about Netflix and MVP heavily featuring Ariel Helwani on the broadcast proved to be right. Thankfully, rumors that Ariel would be doing color commentary on the fights proved false. Regardless, Ariel was anywhere and everywhere. Ariel seemed to see himself as the star of the show. Main Character Syndrome, much?
   The funniest Ariel moment of the night was him being in the cage for a post-fight interview with Namo Fazil, who thanked Ali Abdelaziz in his post-fight speech right in front of Ariel (who was beefing with Ali and Belal Muhammad all week long over Israel and Strickland). Then Arman Tsarukyan had an exchange of words with Fazil after he left the cage.

3. MVP doesn’t seem to have any plans for a Netflix follow-up event.
   Nakisa’s comments to Ariel during the telecast seemed to be about waiting to see what the numbers look like. Then their post-fight presser floated the idea of Nate Diaz vs. Mike Perry in a rematch and Gina Carano having a second fight (both terrible ideas).
   “Tonight was a success across the board, no matter how you want to look at it.”

   There are industry rumors of some sort of PFL/MVP deal moving forward. Whether that’s PFL loaning out talent, a licensing deal for PFL to use the MVP MMA name, or even something as big as a spinoff, right now, MVP is in a strange position, and PFL is desperate. They just refinanced two very important liens in London with major financier Ares Capital. Even if PFL and MVP reach a deal, do the sum of the parts equal a cohesive vision and story to sell?

4. So many people were upset about the 20-second finish by Ronda Rousey over Gina Carano.

   Did Gina truly engage in fight training, or was her training about her looks and health? Was this about getting back in good graces of Hollywood after The Mandalorian? Nobody bought into the Girl Power feminism angle this time around. Gina, smiling like a Cheshire cat after the fight, who grabbed a big bag of cash to do the job, really burned people. It was the predictable outcome for all of us who know MMA and have seen Rousey fights before, but for casual fans (like the veteran boxing writer Al Bernstein quoted above), it really seemed to burn people.

5. The problem with MVP MMA is that it struggles to find a consistent theme or audience. They drew a lot of women in Los Angeles. This was much more of a celebrity fight than a sports or MMA fight.
   This was not the 18-to-34-year-old bro demo that Mark Shapiro obsesses over. This was different. The question is whether or not this is an audience that is repeat MMA watchers or just one-and-dones. It wasn’t until the last three fights before we really saw the fans show up.
   That’s not great, especially if the plan was to use the attention garnered by Ronda vs Gina to build Salahdine Parnasse or Robelis Despaigne with American audiences. Also, Intuit Dome is a nice building, but you cannot mask empty seats whatsoever in that place. Very unforgiving.

6. The whole Jon Jones/Tyron Woodley discussion about his UFC contract and Francis Ngannou was a head-slapper

   It just highlights how both Jon Jones and Francis Ngannou are inseparably linked in UFC and MMA HW history. They both need each other to really complete and finish the story of their respective careers.
   Francis beat up a jobber and looked good doing it, but people don’t really want to see him versus Jake Paul.
   Ngannou needs to be fighting the UFC HW top guys, and UFC really could use him (they just don’t want to pay him fairly). Jon Jones is the same way.
   It’s a perfect example of how MVP has some key components and parts, but the sum of the parts doesn’t really add up. PFL was in the Ngannou business. MVP is in the Ngannou business. Without UFC, it feels incomplete.
   As Luke Thomas pointed out, Jon Jones has six fights remaining on the eight-fight UFC deal he signed in 2023. He’ll never get out of that contract to fight Ngannou.
   The biggest advantage UFC has is locking down fighter mobility. PFL has burned through over $300M, if not $400M. ONE burned through at least $500M. They could fundraise, but they could not break UFC fighter contracts and negotiating tactics. It’s why Judge Richard Boulware remains the only threat left to UFC’s business model. Otherwise, they have completely cemented a one-promotion sport.

7. There’s a difference between nostalgia and just being old and washed.

   Nate and I argued in our preview post that this show just felt old heading into it. Nate Diaz’s slurred speech was troubling. Not quite Nam Phan level, but we’re getting there. Ant Evans pointed out on Twitter Saturday night that people industry-wide were in denial about his slurred speech.

   Dillon Danis ended up roasting Nate Diaz as a drunk Uncle at a BBQ, trying to get in a fight.

   Nate got slaughtered by bare-knuckle king Platinum Mike Perry, who has become what everyone thought Kimbo Slice actually was (although he fights just like prime Phil Baroni). This guy is the real street fighter who terminates careers and shaves years off of old UFC veterans. Perry was really the big winner on Saturday night.

8. Dana White saved the Conor McGregor vs. Max Holloway announcement for Francis Ngannou’s fight. It was funny, but it was not surprising at all. It was all too predictable. No matter what anyone else attempts outside of UFC, it is always UFC invading the OODA loop and crashing a news cycle just to screw with people — like distracting a cat with a laser pointer.

9. There was no way some of the guys booked for the MVP MMA card should have been allowed in the cage. Junior dos Santos?!? No bleeping way. Andy Foster approved this. It’s on HIM. Also, notice the shape of the fighters? Luke Thomas joked on his livestream about “Chinese peptides.” Did MVP engage in its own third-party drug testing?

10. What does this event mean for Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano? Ronda was talking about buying a new house in Hawaii, and then she said that Dana texted her the morning of the fight.

The problem with senior-circuit fights like Rousey-Carano is that they don’t lead anywhere. There’s no indication that Ronda is any more interested in fighting Cris Cyborg than she was ten years ago, and sadly, there’s no one else in Women’s MMA that promises an intriguing bout for Rousey.

But MVP has been resourceful so far, and if the show did Netflix-pleasing numbers, there’s still hope for a teeny-tiny bit of competition in MMA.

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded BloodyElbow.com in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.

The UFC is at the APEX this weekend, but nobody cares about that!

Jake Paul’s MVP MMA is happening over in Inglewood, California and live on Netflix. His debut in the MMA space features two of women’s MMA’s best known pioneers. Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano won’t prove anything from a sporting sense, but it will be a big draw featuring the two biggest crossover stars MMA has ever generated.

On the other channel (Paramount+), we’ve got Arnold Allen vs. Melquizael Costa. That’s actually a great fight, but I can’t hate on it getting overlooked. Rousey vs. Carano is fun and that’s been lacking a lot in MMA… for a long time.

The MVP MMA card also has Nate Diaz vs. Mike Perry, Francis Ngannou vs. Philipe Lins and Junior dos Santos vs. Robelis Despaigne.

The UFC card has some OK fights on it, too, like Doo Ho Choi vs. Daniel Santos and Jacqueline Cavalcanti (the best women fighting this weekend) vs. Ketlen Vieira.

Scroll down to see our picks for both events. There’s also commentary included on the MVP MMA picks. There you’ll also find a special appearance from The Eddie Mercado, of MMA Vivisection fame. He was drawn to the bright likes of Rousey vs. Carano and had to make his feelings known.

None of us saw Sean Strickland beating Khamzat Chimaev last week, but — as a whole — we did pretty well. Blaine did the best, going 13-3. I am still on top the leader board, but everyone got a lot closer to me this weekend. That’s because I blew just my second lock pick of the year. I really thought Tatsuo Taira’s ground game would be too much for Joshua Van!

Check out we are picking at this week’s events below.

Leader board

Ronda Rousey (-575) vs. Gina Carano (+425)

Miguel Class: I’m always happy to see a notable fight happening outside the UFC and the fact that the card isn’t entirely just washed up legends is a bonus. Still, the best thing I can say about this fight is that it looks like both Rousey and Carano have taken it seriously and are in better shape than they’ve been in a while.

I feel like…

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UFC 328 goes live this weekend in Newark, NJ. And what a card we have on our hands.

Repellent personalities and personal connections aside, Khamzat Chimaev vs. Sean Strickland is a fascinating match-up. Chimaev might be on his way to a GOAT like career. The mercurial Strickland might be on his way to shocking the world, again. It’s going to be very interesting to see if Chimaev can repeat what he did to win the UFC middleweight title or whether Strickland is capable of pulling off another perfect performance (like we saw against Israel Adesanya and, more recently, Fluffy Hernandez).

The co-main event has the UFC flyweight title on the line. We might as well call it a vacant title considering that Joshua Van won it on a freak injury. He’s got Tatsuro Taira in his first defence. And he’s an underdog in that match, too.

The rest of the main card is very fun. We’ve got the Salsa Boy Waldo Cortes-Acosta looking to keep his amazing run going. He’s got a stiff test in the former of Alexander Volkov, though. We’ve also got Joaquin Buckley vs. Sean Brady and King Green vs. Jeremy Stephens (that should be on Fuel TV, no?).

The prelims have some bangers, too, with Ateba Gautier vs. Ozzy Diaz, Joel Alvarez vs. Yaroslov Amosov and Jim Miller vs. Jared Gordon.

As always you can see our picks below. And, because this is a PLE, we’ve got our reasonings behind the picks, too.

We nailed UFC Perth last week, even if only Nate and Kristen picked Carlos Prates in the main event. On the whole we all had very good records. Kristen had the best, going 14-4. She missed on her lock pick, though (Ben Johnston). I hit on mine (Cam Rowston) and that’s a big reason for why I’m still top. I’m 13-1 when it comes to making lock picks this year.

Check out who are locks are this weekend, below.

Leader board

Khamzat Chimaev (-575) vs. Sean Strickland (+425)

Miguel Class: There are some ways where I could imagine a Sean Strickland win, but that’s more to do with some of the unknowns of Chimaev than anything else. Strickland is such a known commodity at this point that it is tiresome and we know exactly what he brings to the table. He is an above-average backfoot boxer when he gets the perfect opponent who will come forward on him but not too aggressively (e.g. Fluffy) and he’s an uninspiring pressure fighter who throws almost entirely jabs and teeps when faced with an elusive opponent (see the Costa fight).

My only continued reservations about Chimaev stem from his aggression dropping off significantly in later rounds of tough fights, but we’re two and a half years removed from the Usman fight and Chimaev had only been a professional for five years at that point. Plus, we saw him go five rounds with DDP, although Chimaev was obviously losing some explosiveness as the rounds went on.

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Fantasy vs. reality. Wall Street vs. Main Street.

The contrast between TKO’s Q1 2026 record-breaking revenue figures and the economic pain that most Americans are feeling couldn’t be starker.

Meanwhile, Ariel Helwani is reporting that TKO is marketing a pitch deck to high rollers for $1.5 million Willy Wonka golden tickets. These “partner investment” packages include access to UFC White House & UFC 329 on July 11th, 2026, at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

This week’s MMA Draw podcast is a direct rebuttal to Wednesday’s TKO Wall Street call.

Mark Shapiro pushed back against critics of UFC matchmaking, WWE presentation, and unlimited advertising campaigns.

“Change takes getting used to.”

Markets love investing in stability, certainty, and monopolies. That’s what many investors are looking for with TKO.

But despite record-breaking revenues, TKO faces four significant headwinds going into the second quarter of 2026:

• Economic challenges/oil shocks from the US/Iran war

• Complete and total American fan fatigue with the politicization of the UFC

• The degradation of UFC matchmaking and the decline in WWE’s in-ring product

• Negative branding and customer satisfaction with both Paramount & ESPN, and executive obsession with AI.

Mark Shapiro was completely dismissive of these challenges on Wednesday’s TKO Wall Street call and doubled down on an aggressive Middle Eastern event schedule for the second half of 2026 in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Azerbaijan.

We will discuss the four major headwinds on this week’s paid portion of The MMA Draw podcast.

There is a reason we believe the inflationary impact of upcoming oil shocks is going to impact the global economy, especially late-Summer travel.

For the free portion of this week’s podcast, we focus on the Hollywood politics permeating TKO’s attitude towards fans.

There is a reason Mark Shapiro, Nick Khan, and Ari Emanuel see themselves as the star of this multi-billion-dollar show. The executives are bigger than the talent. The system is bigger than the superstars. AI is a mandatory part of the fan experience. Stress testing of both talent and customers is necessary to push boundaries.

“Change takes getting used to.”

There is a reason Mark Shapiro always falls back on Hollywood principles when defending TKO business principles and customer experiences.

In the world of Hollywood, the poors are not the hardcores.

Important News

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Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded BloodyElbow.com in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.

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