The UFC is in Serbia this week, for the first time ever! UFC Belgrade means another early start for those of us in North America. But that’s because this card is not for us. The event is loaded with individuals from the Balkans, including Uros Medic who fights in the main event opposite Daniel Rodriguez.

Medic has been a KO machine for UFC in recent years and, in his last fight, he briefly separated Geoff Neal’s soul from his body. Rodriguez has been out of action for a whil for reasons…

The co-main in Belgrade is Jan Blachowicz vs. Navajo Stirling (who is replacing Bogdan Guskov). Rounding out the main card is Marcin Tybura vs. Aleksandar Rakic, Dusko Todorovic vs. Robert Valentin, Vlasto Cepo vs. Gilbert Urbina and Milos Janicic vs. Noah Gugnon.

The featured prelim is Ludovit Klein vs. Tofiq Musayev. The prelims also have Mateusz Rebecki vs. Kyle Prepolec and Oban Elliott vs. Michael Oliveira.

We did pretty well with our picks last week. Steph was the MVP. She went 16-2 and that’s enough for her to leap frog me into second in our standings.

Scroll down to see who Steph, and everyone else, is picking this week.

Leader board

UFC Belgrade picks and predictions

Uros Medic (-395) vs. Daniel Rodriguez (+310)

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Mega MMA news from the Wall Street Journal this morning: Jake Paul and Nikisa Badarian’s MVP is merging with the PFL to form MVP MMA:

Operating under the MVP banner, the new company will remain privately owned and have a roster of nearly 400 athletes. MVP historically focused on boxing, while PFL centers on mixed martial arts; the merged company will put on fights for both sports.

PFL Chief Executive John Martin, who will run the combined company, has had his eye on major combat sports for well over a decade. The former Time Warner executive said he tried twice, unsuccessfully, to persuade his colleagues there to buy UFC.

“This is personal for me,” said Martin, who has trained in combat sports and joined PFL last year. “In the world of sports, there are very few opportunities that have as much growth ahead of them as combat sports,” he said, adding that he wanted to create a competitor to UFC.

This is the biggest competition the UFC has faced since they bought out Strikeforce in 2011.

Ari Emanuel’s WME Group, which has owned the UFC since 2016 (and formed TKO as a holding company to combine UFC and new acquisition WWE), has NEVER faced serious competition.

Three main factors will separate MVP MMA from the likes of Bellator and PFL:

1. Promotional acumen

2. Professional management

3. Netflix

Let’s talk about each factor in turn.

Jake Paul Can Sell Wolf Tickets, Imagine What He Can Do With Real Fights

The current team actually running the UFC on the day-to-day — Hunter Campbell and matchmakers Mick Maynard and Sean Shelby — do a lot of things well, but one thing they’ve never had to do is face actual competition.

Their job is to serve up “blocks of content,” aka fight slop, to fill out time slots for media partners who have already overpaid for said slop.

I’ll shit on TKO’s “fight promotion” style more extensively in a few paragraphs, but first allow me to sing the praises of Jake Paul and his partner Nakisa Badarian.

These guys took a YouTube influencer with a huge fanbase and sub-professional boxing talent and built him up into one of the biggest promotional draws in boxing history.

Yea the fights mostly sucked, were set up against hand-picked opponents and ultimately ended in Paul’s humiliation and career-ending injury at the gloves of Anthony Joshua, but in the combat sports business that is called getting the job done.

Jake Paul was the 21st Century Primo Carnera, as I explained last November.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the proof:

Yea, I know Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson was bullshit and a disgrace to the sport and Tyson’s legacy and yadda yadda yadda.

The reality is it was what 60 million people wanted to see, and it convinced Netflix first to take a chance on streaming live sports content and second to keep coming back for more.

The Rousey-Rousey card — which featured another bullshit senior league bout as headliner but stacked the undercard with rising talent and compelling matchups — proved that MVP was more than a Jake Paul-dependent one-trick pony.

The evidence for that is that the UFC has swooped in and signed Salahdine Parnasse — a fighter they had made a point of repeatedly passing on when he was a star in Poland’s KSW for nine years — and is rushing him into a main event debut in September in Paris.

Now that MVP will have a contractually locked-in roster — that includes the world’s most exciting and best female fighter Dakota Ditcheva — the UFC will be facing real apples-to-apples competition for the first time in 15 years.

No One at TKO Can Sell Fights Like Jake Paul

Since ESPN took on the risk (and upside) of UFC pay-per-view events in 2019, the TKO team's mandate for any given event has been to find two dudes to make a semi-credible headliner from amongst the 500+ fighters on their roster and fill out the rest of the card with “Guys Fighting!”

ESPN took the risk and took the upside profits. That worked great when the UFC was still putting on Jon Jones or Conor McGregor fights a couple of times a year that more than made up for the other money-losing (for ESPN) duds on the schedule.

By the end of the ESPN deal, TKO was rarely either willing or able to deliver numbered events that would break the profit line for ESPN. And why should they when every event was guaranteed profit for them — especially given the dismal 15% revenue share that went to fighters.

That’s why ESPN didn’t re-up with the UFC. It’s also a big, big factor in Netflix’ decision to pass on buying the numbered events in 2025 — despite Mark Shapiro giving them a 45-day exclusive negotiating window to do so.

Let’s face facts (and sworn court testimony), Dana White isn’t involved in the day-to-day matchmaking at the UFC and hasn’t been in years.

A formerly great mouthpiece who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, White has been checked out for years. Spending more time in casinos and on set with his 20-something influencer crushes Nina Drama and Adin Ross than he spends cageside, White barely preps for his Instagram fight announcements and often seems to have no idea who the fighters he’s selling are.

Joe Silva was the fight booking genius who put together the legendary matchups that the red-faced, lip-smacking Dana White sold so well anyhow.

As for the current crew of Hunter Campbell, Sean Shelby and Mick Maynard?

They might excel at forcing fighters to take low paydays and short-notice fights, but honestly, I’m not convinced those asshats could sell tickets to the prison beatdown of the Tesla Road Rage guy, much less the no-interest dreck they’re actually booking.

Shit like: Magomed Ankalaev vs. Bogdan Guskov, Jailton Almeida vs. Derrick Lewis, Aspen Ladd vs. Norma Dumont, Raquel Pennington vs. Mayra Bueno Silva, Alexandre Pantoja vs. Steve Erceg, Mackenzie Dern vs. Angela Hill, Abus Magomedov vs. Sean Strickland, or Jairzinho Rozenstruik vs. Shamil Gaziev (and believe me I could go on for another 1000 words just listing shitty UFC headliners from the 2020s).

There’s a thing that happens to people who've been getting away with selling absolute slop to an underinformed and captive audience for years — they get fat, lazy, and stupid.

For comparison, here are the best-ever network numbers the UFC has ever pulled; note how many of them were on Brazilian TV in the 2010s.

And I know this doesn’t include pay-per-view events. Here’s the deal: PPV is dead. In the past, like flip phones, fax machines, silent movies, and radio comedies.

So it doesn’t mean shit what UFC did with Conor vs Khabib or Brock vs Frank Mir. PPV was a whole different game and that game is over.

MVP vs UFC will be about how many raw eyeballs can be drawn to a paid subscription service. Period.

And that’s where MVP has its real ace-in-the-hole.

Netflix > Paramount

It’s not even close.

I’ll let this Fortune article about how Netflix is “the one platform to rule them all” make the case (note this was about a congressional hearing freaking out when it looked like Netflix would buy WBD):

Netflix is already the dominant player in subscription video-on-demand, and its acquisition of Warner Bros. could cement its unrivaled monopoly.

…

Netflix already enjoys substantial pricing power. It has been able to increase the cost of its standard and premium packages by 29% and 39%, respectively, since 2020, while still continuing to amass more viewers. Netflix also charges a price premium relative to its peers, which further indicates power. If it were constrained by user-generated platforms, as the merger proponents would have you believe, then subscribers would cancel their subscriptions in favor of YouTube or TikTok. Yet they haven’t.
…
Under a reasonable definition of the SVOD market, Netflix’s market dominance is impossible to ignore. It currently has about a third of all streaming subscribers worldwide.

Or the LA Times in 2024 declaring Netflix won the streaming wars:

The so-called streaming wars are over, they say. Netflix has won. As evidence, they point to rival studios that are now licensing more of their programs to Netflix, including HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and “Insecure,” after years of holding onto their big action movies and popular shows for their own platforms.

“Their competitors are so desperate to make money, they’re giving this content to Netflix,” said Jeffrey Wlodarczak, chief executive of Pivotal Research Group. “This is what winning is.”

As for Paramount, I’ll let this picture of Google headlines do the work of thousands of words:

Game on bitches, I for one, can’t wait to be excited about MMA again.

As for my headline, the one and only remaining Jake Paul fight I’d actually pay to see would be to see him beat up Dana White.

MMA Draw Editor-in-Chief Nate Wilcox founded Bloody Elbow in 2007 and sold it in 2024.

Joe Tessitore talks with Nico Ali Walsh about the Ali Revival Act at the Zuffa Boxing 09 event at MSG.

Our corporate Hollywood overlords at TKO are busy trying to sell the public on things the public doesn’t really want.

• Ari Emanuel is busy in The Wall Street Journal pushing the Paramount-WBD merger.

• Ari’s brother Rahm is busy conducting a fake-and-phony “Do I or don’t I?” media campaign to dip his toes in the 2028 Ari Emanuel US Presidential sweepstakes.

• Unfortunately for Rahm, Ari is not a one-candidate man — not even with his brother potentially in the race. Ari has powerful sway over not only his brother, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (whose state is hosting UFC 330 with Islam Makhachev vs. Ian Garry), Georgia Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff, and Republican Marco Rubio.

• Nick Khan is engaging in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to desperately revive public discussion of the apparently stalled Ali Boxing Revival Act that has little public support and is stuck in an utterly moribund US Senate.
  
  Larry Goldberg at Boxing Insider is reporting that there is an amended version floating in the US Senate but that nobody is disclosing terms to the public.
  
  If this report is correct, it’s shady, but also par for the course, or must we remind our readers of the last-minute wholesale changes to the text of the House version of the Ali Boxing Revival Act that took place just days before the voice vote that pased it out of the lower chamber of Congress.
  

• WWE is busy acquiring media properties like Busted Open Radio on SiriusXM to try to dominate the wrestling media conversation and generate cheap viral clips.

Update: On Thursday morning, TKO and Senate statements to ESPN confirm that the Senate’s amended version of the Ali Revival Act will be unveiled in a mark-up session after the August recess period.

As we have argued for many years to our paid subscribers at The MMA Draw, these people are exhausting. The fans have not been the primary audience that TKO plays to, nor are the fans the primary customer TKO sells its product to and have not been for a decade now.

They are counting on us not to ever smarten up.

The problem is that once someone smartens up to the TKO brass’s obsession with process over substance, it becomes easier to read their schemes and tactics. It means fewer people are willing to buy their dog food.

Calling out the combat sports billionaires does not mean we are “haters” or hate what fans like.

What we are trying to do at The MMA Draw is attempt to inform fans of UFC, WWE, and boxing how the TKO deciders see the world, who they schmooze to get their deals cut, and what we believe their goals to be.

It’s not about making ordinary fans feel powerless or stupid.

It’s about empowering fans with the information needed to create their own mental filter and understand what the calculating conquerors in the TKO C-suites are up to when they make the decisions that determine the direction of the sports we love.

$7.7B reasons for UFC to defend the Paramount-WBD merger

When Ari Emanuel managed to extract (on paper) $7.7B over seven years for UFC media rights on Paramount, it was one of the greatest sports media rights deals of all time. TKO stock soared from the $150s into the $200s.

Even better for the WME Group that owns a controlling share in TKO, this deal happened right after Ari got $1.5B for his South Park clients Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

So of course The King of Hollywood, who made his billions not in Hollywood but in combat sports, is going to defend a merger that could significantly devastate Hollywood… because, hey, Ari will be a big winner in all of this.

With the UFC, Ari Emanuel and his WME Group perfected an all-in-one soup-to-nuts production content creation package that they sold to a streaming platform as a turnkey package at an enormous profit margin.

Full spectrum WME control.

However, Ari Emanuel is not a great public salesman. He’s a masterful manipulator in one-on-one settings (see: Vince McMahon, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, David Ellison, Larry David). He’s brilliant in winning (or threatening) a room or office.

What Ari Emanuel is not — and never has been — is a master marketer to the masses. He doesn’t win the public over. He learned quickly that to build the Endeavor empire, you didn’t need to win over the world. You just needed to win over the Khaldoon Al-Mubaraks of the world.

Which is why I am not surprised that Ari Emanuel’s supposedly “fiery” Wall Street Journal editorial defending the Paramount-WBD merger landed like a thud with the public.

Here’s how Elon Musk’s Grok described Ari’s WSJ editorial.

Let’s check in on the Twitter reaction to Ari’s WSJ op-ed.

Kim Masters from Puck, which is represented by WME, didn’t hold back either:

David Poland correctly points out the obvious billionaire obsession regarding AI and Sovereign Wealth Fund backing this OVER HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR sum of debt to finance David Ellison’s media dreams.

Charlie Gasparino, a lead media water carrier for the merger, continues to argue against California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s rationale for litigation:

The response to Mr. Gasparino is rather simple. The Ellison family chose to take on massive debt financing to build their media empire by wildly overpaying for WBD. They leveraged themselves into a corner.

Larry Ellison had to personally guarantee at least $40B of his personal fortune (primarily tied up in Oracle stock) and managed to get the Gulf States to backstop the rest of the merger in exchange for a very high % of supposedly non-voting ownership.

It’s incumbent on these networks to argue legally and politically why this merger won’t destroy a significant amount of consumer choice, media freedom, career opportunities, and shareholder value.

Simply put, Paramount focused on the process game with Makan Delrahim and Ari Emanuel. Now Paramount has hired Beth Wilkinson as their lead attorney for litigation against the state AGs.

Beth Wilkinson is a long-time Washington DC attorney who represented Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and helped Microsoft secure antitrust approval for their acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Makan Delrahim was President Trump’s first antitrust attorney at the DOJ. Delrahim was hired by the Ellisons to expedite the legal and paperwork process to cram through the Paramount-WBD merger.

Ari Emanuel was President Trump’s personal Hollywood agent long before Trump was a politician.

Emanuel was also instrumental in facilitating the Ellisons’ purchase of Paramount by inviting David Ellison to attend two 2025 UFC events cage side, where he met with President Trump and allegedly smoothed over any concerns Trump had regarding the Paramount-Skydance merger.

Paramount didn’t bother trying to win public support for their nascent media empire. The Ellisons just bought a string of companies, made a bunch of public firings and expected the public to like it or lump it.

The media outlet still has not presented a persuasive public argument or rationale explaining why consumers, workers, or investors will benefit from a Paramount-WBD merger.

In our little corner of the combat sports world, there has been celebration that UFC is on Paramount instead of behind the ESPN+ paywall.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has more interest in promoting even bigger boxing matches on Paramount because they (along with Qatar and the UAE) own a big chunk of the combined Paramount-WBD.

I will gladly concede these points.

Sharon Waxman, a veteran Hollywood media writer, argued in The New York Times that the key to getting the Paramount-WBD merger passed is transferring CNN over to someone else. She argues that Barry Diller is interested in acquiring CNN alongside former CNN head Jeff Zucker. What’s the conflict?

• It was Jeff Zucker who gave President Trump unlimited oxygen during the 2016 US presidential primary & general election cycles, airing over two dozen of his rallies in full while airing literally zero Bernie Sanders rallies — despite Sanders consistently drawing much bigger crowds.

• Jeff Zucker is CEO of RedBird IMI, a joint venture created by Gerry Cardinale's RedBird Capital Partners and Abu Dhabi-backed International Media Investments (IMI).

• Gerry Cardinale has emerged as one of Ari Emanuel's most significant financial partners through RedBird Capital, alongside long-time financial backers including Silver Lake.

• Gerry Cardinale joined Paramount's board as part of the Skydance-Paramount transaction, reflecting RedBird Capital's central financing and ownership role in the merger.

It’s all one big circle.

From Waxman’s piece:

Paramount seems well aware of this narrative, with one lawyer close to its side telling me about the state attorneys general: “They don’t want Ellison to control CNN, period. But they can’t say that. That would be a violation of the First Amendment.” (All 12 of the attorneys general are Democrats.)

Paramount’s chief legal counsel, Makan Delrahim, ran the antitrust division of the Justice Department in the first Trump administration. Both publicly and privately he has been confidently asserting that based on the law the merger was not in question.

The merger opposition is being spearheaded by Norm Eisen, a former Obama ambassador and a leading legal strategist during the 2019 Trump impeachment. He is a founder of the group Democracy Defenders Fund, which is helping to lead the fight against the merger.

Here’s the problem with Waxman’s thinking: given the heavy political nature of the Larry Ellison & Donald Trump relationship, it is very clear — as outlined in numerous media reports and in a recent Delaware shareholder derivative lawsuit against Paramount — that influence over CNN is a big deal to The Donald.

Remember how we spent many years declaring TKO a government contractor and political mercenary? We weren’t lying to you. We just didn’t know how spot on we truly were or that there would be hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions between TKO and various governments and government-backed entities.

There are billions at stake in monopolizing boxing

Which brings us to the rather curious — and transparently desperate — attempt to revitalize public discussion of TKO’s Ali Revival Act.

The act would essentially give TKO a pass to ignore the original Muhammad Ali Act that gave boxers many rights not enjoyed by MMA fighters or pro-wrestlers — including sunset provisions on contracts and firm separation of managers, promoters and sanctioning bodies

If TKO gets this legislation passed (as-is), the gravity of the legislation will force the other boxing promoters into TKO’s new UBO system.

The clock is ticking on the Senate calendar for anything to get passed in this current legislative session. August recess is arriving. Old parliamentarian war horse Mitch McConnell may be even be dead. Who knows.

September usually is a time to hurriedly pass budget bills. Then it’s Midterm election season. Then comes the Lame Duck session. Before you know it, a new Senate and House will be here.

Which is why I found it extremely interesting that Nick Khan would get up to his old tricks by trying to breathe oxygen into what looked like a very sclerotic and quiet Senate calendar featuring a supposedly stalled-out Ali Revival Act.

Enter Nico Ali Walsh, the face of opposition for the Ali Revival Act in Senate testimony. His manager/handler is Amer Abdallah, who was previously photographed with Daniel Kinahan and Dan Bilzerian. What a combination. (Abdallah publicly disavowed Kinahan after US sanctions were implemented.)

Nico, who voiced public opposition to the Ali Revival Act, suddenly announced last week that he was going to visit Nick Khan at the Zuffa Boxing 09 event at The Felt Forum (MSG). Why would someone opposed to the Ali Revival Act suddenly be eager to discuss the bill in multiple public forums?

Right on cue, Nico and Amer Abdallah met with Nick Khan in Manhattan.

A heavily prepared and coached Joe Tessitore then “interviewed” Nico Ali Walsh on the Paramount broadcast of Zuffa Boxing 09. It was a useless encounter for both men.

Then Nico and Amer did the social media circuit, including an interview with Sean Zittel and… an interview with former Nick Khan client and current Nick Khan guy, Ariel Helwani. Of course.

In the Helwani interview, Nico Ali Walsh claimed that individuals connected to the Senate told him that the Ali Revival Act in its current form would not pass. He then proceeded to give suggestions as to how to amend the Revival Act.

Why would someone opposed to the bill be providing suggestions for how to get it passed? What is Nico Ali Walsh’s agenda here? He repeatedly insisted, “I’m just here to support the fighters.”

If that’s the case, why lobby to change the most pro-fighter legislation ever passed — legislation crafted and lobbied for by his legendary grandfather?

Suffice to say, the limited oxygen that Nico Ali Walsh has contributed to the conversation has not exactly been persuasive to fight fans. Tim Bradley trashed it.

Why would Nick Khan and Harrison Whitman be so transparent in their tactics and procedural mechanics? It is all very, very bizarre. I can guarantee one thing: if this was Frank or Lorenzo Fertitta, they would have never let Nico Ali Walsh on their broadcast without a transaction being finalized and his messaging being on point to support their agenda.

Instead, chalk it up to another insidious but goofy attempt to get the Ali Revival Act endorsed. Just like Khan and Whitman did with Mike McAtee of USA Boxing until he got his hand caught in the cookie jar and the Board of Directors stepped in. Tyson Lee and Hector Colon ended up exiting the scene, whatever their motivation and reasons may have been.

Bottom line? These billionaires at TKO never stop. They never stop trying to destroy the competition. They never stop obsessing over their next scheme. They — and their voluminous amount of Personal Assistants — never sleep. Empire builders and destroyers know nothing else. These political and financial mercenaries will stop at no cost to consolidate, swallow, and concentrate all of their media, financial, and legal firepower so they can conquer every single aspect of your personal and private life.

What a devil’s bargain.

Zach Arnold is 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 marketing premise of the TKO-Turki Alalshikh alliance to fans is simple: let us monopolize boxing, and we’ll deliver what the fans want.

If this weekend was a test case of that premise, they failed.

When Turki Alalshikh introduced himself to the boxing world, it was as a gracious host and Chairman of the Saudi General Sports Authority, the behind-the-scenes super fan with the big, big checkbook.

Early events held in Saudi under Turki’s auspices, like the WWE’s 2018 Greatest Royal Rumble and the final of the World Boxing Super Series middleweight tournament — amidst rumors that it was Saudi money that made the tourney final happen after a chaotic series of events, “injuries” and seemingly intractable negotiations — didn’t even mention Turki Alalshikh.

The quotes in the press releases were solely from excited American and European promoters who suddenly had the means to make the fans’ dreams come true, albeit on the other side of the world.

Even Turki’s 2018 promotion to Chairman of the Saudi General Entertainment Authority didn’t come with an increase in his public profile as he allowed promoters like Eddie Hearn to take the credit for mega-bouts like Andy Ruiz Jr. vs. Anthony Joshua II, which just happened to be held in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia.

Turki Makes a Big Splash with a Bellyflop in the Deep End of the Pool

When Turki did announce his presence in a big way in 2023 with the Tyson Fury vs Francis Ngannou superfight, his personal sales pitch resembled that of AEW’s nepobaby billionaire failson Tony Khan - the superfan who wasn’t Walmart.

In fact, Turki’s first quote in the press release announcing the fight didn’t come until the 15th paragraph, and the whole thrust of the document was about the exciting matchups and the high hopes for a boom in tourism to Saudi:

Now in its fourth year, Riyadh Season aims to create more than 200,000 employment opportunities and empower over 2,000 local and international companies to establish the most distinguished entertainment experiences around the world.

His Excellency Turki Alalshikh, Chairman of the General Entertainment Authority, who is leading the organisation of Riyadh Season 2023, said: “Riyadh Season has developed a reputation for staging iconic events featuring some of the biggest names and brands around, which is why people travel so far from around the world to be part of this unmatched experience. This year, we want to go even further and give visitors moments that will exceed even their wildest imaginations. With the events and guests we have lined up, we intend for this year’s Riyadh Season to create thrills and surprises for guests like never before.”

This is how Karim Zidan introduced Turki to our readers in 2023:

Ngannou’s contract with the PFL allowed him the chance to explore various boxing prospects. This, coupled with the PFL’s decision to sell a minority stake in the company worth a reported $100 million to a Saudi subsidiary owned by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, helped pave the way for his association with Saudi Arabia.

Venturing to Riyadh, the former UFC champion met with al-Sheikh , who chairs the General Authority for Entertainment and holds a influential position in Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman’s inner circle. An agreement was eventually reached to co-host the Fury vs. Ngannou showdown in collaboration with Riyadh Season.

By October 2023, Zach Arnold was warning MMA Draw readers that Riyadh was very close to a war zone that was likely to expand; you literally read it here first.

By January of 2024, Zach Arnold pointed out that Saudi money came with strings attached and they were not planning to settle for second-rate cards after paying first-rate site fees:

…“the powers-that-be” in Saudi Arabia were supposedly not very happy about the March 2nd fight card booked by UFC and that the Saudi UFC event would be postponed until June of 2024 …(and) the originally-booked UFC Saudi card would still take place… at the UFC APEX.

The UFC was trying to sell the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia a warehouse-level fight card for $20 million!?!

As one can rightfully surmise, the Saudis were less than impressed with UFC’s business behavior and told them to come back under better terms and conditions.
…
This is the back drop for which UFC must carefully navigate their reported $20 million deal with KSA for an upcoming fight show. The UFC is used to controlling everything.

Ari Emanuel’s recent decision to shift UFC & WWE into quasi-government contractor status puts TKO into a somewhat vulnerable position as a political shop. If you take the paycheck from Saudi Arabia, then you must do what they tell you.

Since the Endeavor purchase of UFC — and now the merger with WWE into TKO — the powers-that-be at UFC have gotten very comfortable dictating the terms and conditions for everything. Now they’re financially getting a taste of their own medicine. The UFC business model has dramatically shifted away from relying entirely upon selling tickets. They’re a monster in their own sport.

With a $20 million check, Saudi Arabia is showing you that they want a serious partnership with the UFC. The UFC is going to have to face an increasingly difficult choice: do we grow our partnership with KSA or do we risk getting bludgeoned the same way the PGA has?

In June, the Saudis finally got a UFC Fight Night card they were happy with it featured former Middleweight champ Robert Whittaker as the headliner in June 2024, rather than former interim featherweight champ Josh Emmett. Major upgrade.

By that time, Turki Alalshikh was already a familiar face to American fans, having introduced himself directly via an emergency appearance on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani in February.

By June 2024, we were reporting on the nascent Saudi-TKO alliance and its big plans to take over boxing, and we were also reporting that Turki was taking a direct advisory role with fighters:

“I want to thank (boxer) Jared Anderson for taking my advise and seeking out to coach and trainer Sugar Hill to train him for his upcoming fight.”

A financier of a major boxing event on August 3rd giving advice to one of the boxers on the card in regards to who to train with surely isn’t a conflict of interest, right?

Boxing Fans Should Be Used to Turki By This Point

Boxing fans, especially Brits, have been waiting to see Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua for at least 11 years.

Nick Parkinson of ESPN sums up why this fight was anticipated for so long:

November 2015: Fury outpointed (Wladimir) Klitschko for the WBA, IBF and WBO world heavyweight titles in Germany. In an inspired performance, Fury outboxed the Ukrainian.

The less experienced Joshua was the one doing the calling out and there was already interest in seeing Fury vs. Joshua. Joshua told ESPN ahead of Fury’s points triumph over Klitschko: “100% I think me and Tyson could fight next year. People demand what they want to see and they are always coming up to me and asking when am I going to fight Fury.”

December 2015: Just 10 days after winning three versions of the world title, Fury was stripped of the IBF belt due to rules about mandatory challengers.

April 2016: Joshua picked up the same IBF belt Fury was stripped of when he destroyed Charles Martin inside two rounds. He became Britain’s second reigning world heavyweight champion along with Fury, who still held the WBA and WBO belts.

“Me, Tyson Fury and David Haye, we have to fight,” Joshua told a post-fight press conference.

“We can’t get through this whole era without fighting, we will get it on at the right time. It’s just bound to happen at some stage.”

Unfortunately, as the rest of this article chronicles, fans have gotten an endless loop of empty promises.

Failed drug tests, injuries, and “drink, drugs, and depression” on Fury’s part prevented the fight happening in 2016.

When Fury finally returned in 2018, after a couple of tune-up wins, he fought Deontay Wilder instead of Joshua, got knocked down twice on his way to a draw.

Then in 2019, Joshua lost to Andy Ruiz, Jr., which forced a rematch, while Fury focused on a rematch with Wilder.

Back to Parkinson for the 2020-2021 era when the fight was most anticipated:

December 2019: Joshua won back the WBA, IBF and WBO belts with a wide but cautious points win over Ruiz Jr. in Saudi Arabia.

February 2020: Fury produced a brilliant display to stop Wilder in Round 7 and become WBC champ -- but there is a rematch clause.

June 2020: Joshua and Fury, both at their peaks and with all the world titles between them, agreed to fight two times in 2021. The first fight -- reportedly worth £200 million - would be in the summer of 2021.

“We have agreed the basics of the deal, a two-fight deal,” Eddie Hearn, who promotes Joshua, told ESPN.

Venues and dates had yet to be agreed while both boxers also had defences of their titles to get through before their fight could become a reality.

December 2020: Joshua beat Kubrat Pulev to retain his IBF, WBO and WBA titles to set up the prospect of an undisputed title fight vs. Fury.

“It’s not about the opponent -- it’s about who has got the belt, and if that’s Tyson Fury, let it be Tyson Fury,” Joshua said after dispatching Pulev. “It’s one fight at a time, picking them off one by one.”

Meanwhile, the menacing figure of Oleksandr Usyk, who won a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics like Joshua, now loomed large on the heavyweight scene. After ruling as undisputed cruiserweight champion, Usyk won a second fight at heavyweight in October 2024. But the focus is still on making Fury vs. Joshua.

January 2021: Hearn said a deal to fight Fury in 2021 is all but done, with a venue in the Middle East a front-runner to host it.

February 2021: A deal seems tantalisingly close and fight fans are getting excited.

“The fight is very close to being done now,” Frank Warren, Fury’s co-promoter, told ESPN. “It’s all COVID-19 related but I think it will go on sometime in June, latest July.

“It’s going to be a two-fight deal, and it depends what happens in the first fight and the agreement of all parties as to where and what happens after that.”

In March 2021, Eddie Hearn made comments on TalkSPORT about Fury vs. Joshua happening at Wembley Stadium.

We’ll let Joe Brophy of TalkSport tell the next part of the story:

The pair first signed contracts to meet in August 2021 for the undisputed WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO heavyweight world titles in Saudi Arabia.

But a court of arbitration ruled that Fury had to battle Deontay Wilder in a trilogy bout instead.

The Gypsy King KO’d Wilder but Joshua was forced to face his mandatory Oleksandr Usyk and was dethroned as a result.

In 2022, despite losing the rematch with the Ukrainian, AJ was invited back to the table for a December matchup with Fury.

The pair agreed financial terms, but talks collapsed at contract stages and Fury went onto beat Derek Chisora instead.

That’s where Turki Alalshikh and his bro bosses’ personal piggybank, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, came into the picture.

Turki Alalshikh Couldn’t Book a Shotgun Wedding

Alalshikh whipped out the Crown Prince’s oil-and-blood-money-soaked checkbook and not only signed both Fury and Joshua but also signed ex-UFC champ Francis Ngannou, Ukrainian Heavyweight champ Oleksandr Usyk, and Deontay Wilder. So, Fury vs Joshua would have to wait.

Turki immediately booked Fury vs. Ngannou, and the Brit wound up on his ass in the third round before struggling to a ten-round decision win.

This was devastating for Fury’s image and credibility because the “former” UFC Heavyweight champion walked into a boxing ring and pummeled him to the mat. Fury never really recovered from this.

It also allowed Ngannou to get a second big payday against Anthony Joshua in a bout that would ruin Ngannou’s reputation.

Meanwhile, Turki’s dream fight for Joshua was against Wilder. Unfortunately, the dumbass fucked that all up by booking both men to headline a December 2023 card in Riyadh.

Stupidly, instead of just putting them together, he booked both guys in tune-up fights on a barely-watched card. Rookie promoter mistake that quickly bit Turki in the ass when Wilder lost to Joseph Parker in a fight literally no one was asking for.

2024-25: Usyk, Ngannou, Dubois and Jake Paul Get Between Fury and Joshua

Turki wasn’t deterred, though, and kept booking both fighters in bouts that did anything but build toward the dream fight.

Fury spent 2024 getting beaten twice by the great Oleksandr Usyk in two badly promoted and severely under-watched bouts.

Meanwhile, Joshua got his shot at Francis Ngannou and made it count with a second-round KO. That was fine and all, but the only point of booking freakshow fights featuring a literal amateur boxer like Ngannou who was 0-0 as a pro boxer before facing two of the best heavyweights of our era is to cash in big.

But since Turki is possibly the worst promoter of all-time, both bouts lost mountains of Saudi money.

A big part of the problem is the fights all happened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — a city no one wants to visit, even before the region became a magnet for Iranian and Yemeni missiles and drones.

So the next move was to book Joshua in an IBF title fight against the far-less-well-known champ Daniel Dubois in London’s Wembley Stadium.

Unfortunately for Joshua, Turki, and the boxing business, Dubois beat the crap out of the much bigger star and knocked him out in five rounds. That did set up a Dubois-Usyk bout in mid-2025 that accounts for Dubois’ greatest moment of fame (he’s the red line above). Unfortunately for Dubois, Usyk wrecked him in five rounds.

But let’s get back to our main characters.

After losing to the guy who lost to the guy, Joshua’s career needed a reset, so Turki loaned him out to two guys who actually know how to promote fights: Jake Paul and Nakisa Badarian of MVP Promotions.

Let me prove my point:

The Jake Paul-Anthony Joshua fight was easily the least important, most one-sided, and stupidest bout either man has been in since 2022, and yet look at those numbers.

Yeah, people are stupid and all, but it takes smart promotion to sell wolf tickets on that scale. Smart promotion and a partnership with Netflix, the dominant streaming platform of our era (except for YouTube, but that’s a story for a different day).

This Netflix freak show fight of Paul vs. Joshua had a happy ending with huge viewership numbers, as big as the number Joshua did to Jake Paul’s jaw. He finally gave the hated influencer the beating people had been paying to see someone dish out to him since his boxing career began.

That’s when Turki started talking about making nearly forgotten dreams come true. At last, he was going to finally book Fury vs. Joshua.

Of course, since Turki Alalshikh is incapable of learning, he decided to agree to book both pugilists for tune-up fights first. Tyson Fury went to Thailand, and Anthony Joshua was in Jeddah. Both were in fights that appeared on paper to be squash matches.

Why did Turki Waste So Much Time?

It turns out that boxing is a really expensive endeavor. It also turns out that there really is a price being paid for the war between the United States and Iran. It doesn’t help when Aramco oil fields and ports are getting blasted by missiles and drones from Yemen’s Ansar Allah.

Did Turki’s piggy bank go empty? His attitude certainly has changed in the last couple of months. Now he’s suddenly concerned about the opinion of Netflix, on whom he is relying to help broadcast and finance Fury vs. Joshua.

Big change from his rumored ugly behavior to Netflix’ Chief Content Officer Bela Bajarian, which our own Blake Avignon reported in June 2025 caused a “breakdown that nearly cost the (Canelo-Crawford) event.”

We also reported on Turki publicly dissing TKO’s Dana White around that same time.

Now, the mighty Turki has come down to Earth. He’s no longer a Roc soaring over West Asia and casting a shadow over the entire boxing world. He’s more like a turkey looking to feather his nest with Netflix cash.

In 2026, what Netflix wants, Netflix gets.

Suddenly, the conversation about Fury vs. Joshua was about money. And location. Sure, Wembley Stadium sounds great, but can the fight happen at 4 AM local time?

Turki’s public comments incensed UK boxing fans and gave Eddie Hearn’s arch-nemesis, Simon Jordan, plenty of material to work with.

The well was being poisoned, and UK fans were being conditioned to accept the likelihood that the fight they always wanted to see would not happen at Wembley Stadium but instead would happen either in Las Vegas (which Dana White would like) or Madison Square Garden. Neither location would sell the sheer number of tickets that Wembley Stadium could for the long-awaited Fury-Joshua fight.

But conditions changed rather quickly.

Things Didn’t Go Well This Weekend

I should mention that Anthony Joshua was a passenger in a tragic car accident in Nigeria last December that killed two of his closest friends. The video of a crowd surrounding a very dazed Joshua was stunning, as he was transported to a hospital for injuries he suffered.

I should also mention that Tyson Fury also lost a (former) close associate earlier this year — that being promoter Daniel Kinahan, who was lost to the legal system following his arrest in the United Arab Emirates.

Both men put up brave fronts, Joshua speaking movingly of his deceased friends and Fury saying of his former promoter’s arrest:

“It’s none of my business … it’s got nowt to do with me.”

“I have never been sponsored by MTK ever,” he said. When reminded that he used to be part of the MTK stable and had worn their logo, he responded bluntly. “That was from 2017 until 2020. Three years and that was it. Done. End of.”

The point being, both fighters are aging rapidly and varying degrees of damaged goods. Both men also haunted by personal loss.

All of which are blinking red lights that would tell any competent boxing promoter:

BOOK THIS FIGHT NOW. DO NOT DICK AROUND WITH BULLSHIT BOUTS.

Unfortunately, Turki Alalshikh is not a competent promoter and instead approved Tyson Fury against an even older Mariusz Wach and put Anthony Joshua in the ring with Kristian Prenga.

How did it go? Here’s how it went:

The Independent summed up the carnage:

Tyson Fury won first in seven rounds on Friday night, the next night Anthony Joshua won in two rounds, but that does not tell the story of an extraordinary weekend of fights.

The pair have agreed to fight each other later this year in a massive and long overdue showdown. The harsh truth is that neither victory was impressive.

Fury looked sluggish and Joshua was dropped twice by Kristian Prenga in the opening round before recovering his senses to deliver a stunning knockout.

However, there is still no date, no venue and not even confirmation of a country for their long overdue fight. The original signed contracts from two months ago are close to being ripped up; the contracts are only valid if their fight takes place in Britain.

The pair have been linked since they both held versions of the world heavyweight title at the same time in the summer of 2016; it is one of boxing’s longest running sagas, a potentially great fight that is now moving ever closer to collapse.

Paul Magno said it better for The Boxing Tribune:

If you saw the first minute of Fury-Wach, there was no need to watch any of the rest (I deserve a sub just for saving you the time, by the way).

A half-assing jiggly-bellied Fury pecked from the outside against a lumbering jiggly-bellied Wach, occasionally making some actual contact in a dance of Humpty Dumpty bookends. The former WBC heavyweight champ would occasionally toss a flurry into the mix, or some “classic” Tyson Fury scripted but totally unscripted ring shenanigans—a little dance, a little hand gesture, a blown kiss—for the sake of his reality show film crew trying to find something the least bit entertaining to put in a big fight segment.
…
For about four minutes, I actually became a Kristian Prenga fan. Not because I necessarily dislike Anthony Joshua or even care about Prenga all that much. I’m just a miserable fuck, I guess, who likes watching best-laid cynical plans fall to pieces.

And that almost happened in the opening round of Joshua-Prenga in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Saturday afternoon when the massive underdog dropped Joshua twice and nearly put the kibosh on the Saudi-fueled Netflix clash between Joshua and Tyson Fury.

Alas, my elation ended right at the beginning of the second round when it became clear that the script was not going to be flipped.

The Albanian came out for the second round and didn’t press the attack on an AJ who was sporting the goofy “this ain’t no big thing” grin he has whenever he’s getting whooped and it’s definitely a “big thing.” Joshua’s knockout of Prenga later that same round generated a wave of “fix” cries from fans who couldn’t fathom why the extreme longshot pug didn’t jump right back on offense to put the favorite away.

Oof. That ain’t good. The sheer look of concern and shock on the faces of those in the front row in Jeddah was a true “only in boxing” moment. After R1, everything looked dead. After R2, Anthony Joshua saved everyone’s plans — barely.

Are fans more excited or less excited to see Fury vs. Joshua after what transpired this past weekend? On the one hand, both guys are washed up. On the other hand, this could really end up being an exciting bum fight. One guy looks like a billion dollars and the other is Tyson Fury. It appears that neither man has their equilibrium left in the ring.

If Turki Alalshikh is the key man in charge of promoting this fight, it will end up on a promotional road to nowhere.

If Nick Khan and Lawrence Epstein take the lead and partner with nemesis Eddie Hearn, Fury-Joshua could still have some juice.

It will be up to external forces — mainly at DAZN and in West Asia — that will determine what Turki’s future role in boxing is moving forward. Because if Turki’s role is that of a mascot in the crowd as we’ve seen the last couple of weeks in New York at Fanatics Fest and for Zuffa Boxing 09 last night at Madison Square Garden, then SELA and the grown-ups in charge may finally come in to save the day. Even if it’s many years too late.

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

ESPN’s reported $60M to $65M annual framework may have created the headline for Pat McAfee, but according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions, it never defined the negotiation.

It merely revealed where the conversation began.

So. Here. We. Go.

The Market Speaks

Every negotiation has an anchor.

In June, The Athletic reported ESPN and Pat McAfee’s representatives were negotiating within a framework valued between $60M and $65M annually. At first glance, it looked like the number that would define the negotiation. It wasn’t.

Sources familiar with the discussions describe ESPN’s reported framework as the first public benchmark rather than the final destination. Like any high-profile negotiation, the opening valuation served less as a conclusion than a starting point, establishing the range from which every subsequent conversation would evolve.

Publicly, the number became the headline. But in reality, it quietly became the floor.

Once the reported framework became the dominant public reference point, it also became an easy explanation for unrelated events. As ESPN announced layoffs, commentators increasingly tied those workforce reductions to McAfee's reported contract discussions despite multiple sources familiar with the matter telling me the two were unrelated.

The Silence Before the Bid

If you’ve been following this story, you’ve probably noticed something.

ESPN’s reported offer dominated the conversation, yet nobody else seemed to make a move publicly. No bidding war. No competing offers. Just… silence.

At first, that might seem strange.

But from the people I’ve spoken with, that’s exactly how this was expected to play out.

Multiple sources familiar with the situation have told me Netflix has not formally entered negotiations for Pat McAfee. That isn’t because the company isn’t interested. It’s because there was never any reason to rush.

Once The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported ESPN's proposed valuation, the negotiations entered a new phase. Marchand was hardly a random messenger. He has covered TKO and the sports media industry extensively and has interviewed Mark Shapiro about the company's strategy and the future of sports media.

MMA Draw Editor-in-Chief Nate Wilcox believes that benchmark didn’t emerge by accident: “While we can’t prove TKO provided that number to Andrew Marchand, it’s difficult to identify another party that stood to benefit as much from ESPN’s reported valuation becoming public. Once that number was out, the market had a benchmark,” he said.

Think of it like an auction. The first bid doesn’t usually win. It simply tells everyone else where the conversation begins.

That’s the position Netflix finds itself in.

Rather than guessing what it would take to land one of the biggest personalities in sports media, it now has the benefit of watching the market reveal itself first. That kind of patience isn’t weakness. It’s leverage.

And that’s where this story starts to become a lot more interesting.

Because while the public was focused on ESPN’s reported offer, the real question wasn’t what ESPN was willing to pay.

It was what Pat McAfee’s camp believed he was actually worth.

That answer, as it turns out, is significantly higher than the first number that made headlines.

The Price of Independence

If ESPN’s reported offer established the floor, the next question was always going to be simple:

That answer started to come into focus shortly after Sports Illustrated reported that Ari Emanuel and TKO President Mark Shapiro had opened negotiations around a staggering $100M per year.

Whether that figure was ever expected to become the final deal is almost beside the point.

Opening numbers in negotiations like these aren’t predictions. They’re statements. They tell the market how you value the asset before anyone else gets the chance to.

After speaking with multiple executives familiar with the discussions, my understanding is that if Netflix ultimately decides to enter the race, the most realistic landing spot sits closer to $75M to $85M annually.

That’s not an official offer, and negotiations remain fluid, but it’s the range that repeatedly surfaced in conversations with sources.

Even at the lower end of that range, McAfee would be operating in territory very few personalities in sports media have ever reached.

The scale of that potential jump becomes even clearer when viewed against McAfee’s previous deals. His reported 4-year, $120M agreement with FanDuel established him as one of the highest-paid personalities in sports media.

His subsequent licensing agreement with ESPN was reportedly valued at approximately $85 million over 5 years.

If the next agreement ultimately lands within the range described by multiple executives familiar with the discussions, it would represent another dramatic reset of McAfee’s market value in just a few years. Valuation jumps of that magnitude are rare, even among the biggest stars in sports and entertainment.

Companies aren’t just evaluating Pat McAfee’s daily show. They’re evaluating everything that comes with it.

• His live show.

• His digital audience.

• His relationship with the NFL.

• His role inside WWE.

• His ability to create original programming.

• His production company.

• His influence with younger audiences who consume sports very differently than previous generations.

Taken individually, each of those assets has value. Bundled together, they become something much harder to replicate. That’s why this negotiation has become so much bigger than one contract.

It’s really a debate over what independence is worth in modern sports media. And that debate is exactly why the next potential bidder matters so much. Because if Netflix decides the price is justified, the conversation changes overnight.

Christmas Morning

If Netflix is going to make a move, it won’t be because Pat McAfee hosts a successful daily sports show.

That’s only part of the equation.

The bigger prize is everything that comes with him.

Multiple sources I’ve spoken to believe that if Netflix enters the race, the conversation extends far beyond The Pat McAfee Show. The appeal is the ability to build an entire sports ecosystem around one of the most recognizable personalities in the industry.

One opportunity keeps coming up:

Netflix has already planted its NFL flag by acquiring Christmas Day games, and if those broadcasts are going to become an annual tentpole, they’ll need more than just live football. They’ll need personalities that viewers already trust before kickoff and still want to hear from after the final whistle.

That’s where McAfee becomes more than a host:

• He’s pregame.

• He’s halftime.

• He’s postgame.

• He’s shoulder programming.

• He’s original documentaries.

• He’s weekly content that keeps subscribers engaged long after Christmas is over.

Netflix wouldn’t just be acquiring a daily sports program. It would be investing in someone capable of defining what sports on Netflix actually looks like.

And if that’s the vision, it also helps explain why the company has been willing to wait. Because the decision isn’t just whether Pat McAfee is worth the money, it’s whether he’s the right person to become one of the faces of Netflix’s long-term sports strategy.

If that’s the question executives are asking internally, another recent development suddenly becomes impossible to ignore.

David Ellison entered the picture.

The Ellison Effect

While everyone is watching Pat McAfee’s negotiations with ESPN, another deal quietly changed the entire sports media landscape.

It wasn’t about McAfee.

At least, not at first.

According to multiple executives familiar with the discussions, Mark Shapiro’s original vision for the UFC’s post-ESPN package looked very different than where things stand today.

The expectation was that ESPN would continue to carry UFC Fight Nights, while Netflix would become involved elsewhere (likely in quarterly premium PLEs ala UFC White House) in the package.

It wasn't a finalized agreement, but several people I spoke with described it as the direction conversations were heading.

Those discussions also predated the reported New York meeting involving Turki Alalshikh, Dana White, and Netflix executives that I detailed previously, an episode sources described as a turning point in the initial relationship between the two sides.

By the time David Ellison entered the picture, the landscape had already begun to shift.

I have also been told Netflix executives had grown increasingly disappointed with the early performance of WWE Raw. The company remains invested in WWE, but multiple sources said the internal expectations surrounding the deal hadn’t been met. As a result, Netflix became far more selective about what its next major sports investment would look like.

Then everything changed.

According to my sources, the Paramount to UFC negotiations unfolded in distinct phases.

Ari Emanuel led the strategic framework of the agreement and maintained the principal dialogue with David Ellison as Paramount's Skydance transaction progressed.

Once those parameters became clear, sources said Mark Shapiro and Dana White took leading roles in structuring and finalizing the commercial proposal, assembling a package designed to position the UFC alongside the largest premium sports rights properties rather than simply improve upon its previous agreements.

Ellison ultimately agreed to terms that many around the negotiations never expected anyone to accept. And just like that, one of the biggest media rights opportunities in sports was off the board.

That moment matters because it forced everyone else to rethink the landscape.

If Netflix had been evaluating a larger role in the UFC’s future, that option was suddenly gone. Companies reassess. They reprioritize. They start asking where the next transformational asset might come from.

That’s what makes the timing of Pat McAfee’s negotiations so fascinating. Suddenly, one of the most influential independent voices in sports media was entering the market at the exact moment another transformational asset had disappeared.

I’m not suggesting David Ellison’s deal created Pat McAfee’s value. It didn’t.

What it did do was change the board. And when the board changes, so does every move that follows.

Leverage Is a Language

People tend to think negotiations come down to one question.

In reality, that’s usually one of the last questions that gets answered.

The first question is much simpler:

That’s one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding Pat McAfee’s negotiations.

Most of the public conversation has centered on ESPN’s reported offer, but after speaking with multiple sources familiar with the discussions, one detail stood out to me.

The reported ESPN framework does NOT include alternate WWE programming or WWE shoulder content.

At first, that might not sound like a big deal.

It is.

Because it tells you exactly how ESPN values the relationship.

The offer isn’t about building an entire media universe around Pat McAfee. It’s about keeping one of the network’s biggest personalities exactly where he already is.

That’s a very different negotiation than the one another platform could choose to have.

If a company like Netflix decides to enter the conversation, it wouldn’t necessarily be buying a daily sports talk show.

It could be buying a personality capable of anchoring multiple pieces of programming:

• A weekly flagship show.

• NFL coverage.

• Original documentaries.

• Event programming.

• WWE shoulder content.

• Specials.

That’s where leverage starts to become more complicated than simply asking who wrote the biggest check. Two companies can look at the same person and see two completely different businesses.

Neither valuation is inherently wrong.

They’re just buying different things. That’s why opening offers only tell part of the story.

The real negotiation happens when both sides begin defining the future they’re actually trying to build.

Money follows vision. Not the other way around.

Ghosts of Bristol

Some relationships don’t end because one side is right and the other is wrong. They evolve because, over time, each side begins wanting something different.

That’s what makes Pat McAfee’s relationship with ESPN so interesting.

On paper, it’s a perfect partnership. ESPN gained one of the biggest personalities in sports media, and McAfee gained the reach and resources that only the Worldwide Leader could provide.

But if you’ve followed the partnership closely, you’ve probably noticed a pattern: The biggest stories weren’t the interviews. Instead, they were the moments of friction.

When Aaron Rodgers’ appearances became national headlines, ESPN found itself answering questions it never expected to answer. McAfee defended his friend and his show. ESPN defended its brand. Neither side was necessarily wrong, but they weren’t always trying to solve the same problem.

Then came McAfee’s public clash with former ESPN executive Norby Williamson, where he accused one of the network’s most powerful executives of trying to undermine his show. It wasn’t just another controversy. It became a symbol of the growing tension between an independent creator and a legacy media company.

Those moments weren’t isolated by any means.

There were expectations around language, editorial standards, and the realities that come with working for a company built around advertisers, league relationships, and corporate responsibility. Every new guardrail made the balancing act for Pat and his crew a little harder.

That’s not a criticism of ESPN. It’s always been the reality of being ESPN.

The network was trying to protect one of the world’s biggest media brands. McAfee was trying to protect the authenticity that made his brand valuable in the first place.

That’s the tension sitting underneath these negotiations.

Because once you’ve built one of the biggest independent voices in sports media, money is only part of the conversation.

The other part is deciding how much of yourself you’re willing to sell or give away.

Separating Smoke From Fire

Almost immediately, speculation started that the ESPN layoffs were tied to Pat McAfee’s negotiations or that ESPN was clearing salary to make room for a new deal.

I haven’t found anything that supports that.

In fact, ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro told employees the restructuring was driven primarily by the integration of NFL Network and other NFL Media assets into ESPN, creating overlapping roles as the two organizations merged. That’s a very different explanation than the one making the rounds online.

The same goes for claims that Pat McAfee’s future has already been decided.

From everything I’ve been able to verify, it hasn’t.

There’s also an important difference between interest and negotiations.

Companies explore opportunities all the time. That doesn’t automatically mean an offer has been made or that a deal is close. Those are completely different stages of the process, and too often they get lumped together.

Ultima Sententia: The Next Economy

The more I reported this story, the less it felt like a negotiation over one personality.

It started to feel like a negotiation over where the sports media business is headed.

For decades, media companies spent billions acquiring leagues, conferences, and media rights. The assumption was simple: own the games, and the audience will follow.

Today, the platforms with the deepest pockets aren’t just competing for live sports. They’re competing for the people who can make those sports matter before kickoff, after the final whistle, and every day in between.

That’s why Pat McAfee isn’t being valued like a traditional television host.

He’s being valued as an ecosystem.

• A daily show.

• A trusted voice.

• An NFL personality.

• A WWE personality.

• A producer.

• A storyteller.

• A community.

Those aren’t separate businesses anymore. They’re becoming one. That’s also why I keep coming back to one question:

Especially when different companies may value him in completely different ways. ESPN appears to be negotiating for a show. Another platform could be negotiating for something much larger.

That’s an important distinction.

Because the next generation of media deals may not be won by whoever owns the most rights. They just may be won by whoever best connects those rights to audiences.

That’s where personalities like Pat McAfee become incredibly valuable. They aren’t replacing live sports. But they are becoming the connective tissue between leagues, platforms, advertisers, and fans.

The contract will eventually be signed. The headlines will move on. Someone will declare there was a winner. But years from now, I don’t think this negotiation will be remembered for the number.

I think it’ll be remembered as the moment the industry realized it had been asking the wrong question all along…

Follow @bobby_s_axelrod on X/Twitter and @blakeavignon on IG and subscribe to The MMA Draw and The Axe Files for sports intel, business crossovers, and breakdowns the mainstream won’t touch.

Blake Avignon is the pseudonym of a strategist and media executive who has worked across the UFC, F1, MLB, NBA, and NFL: building brands, brokering partnerships, and reshaping the future of sports and entertainment from the inside.

The UFC is back in the Gulf this week, scooping up a fat site fee from some of their favourite patrons. This card is designed to appease the paymasters with lots of fighters from this neck of the woods (and many of them as the favourites).

The main event is Magomed Ankalaev vs. Bogdan Guskov. Guskov comes in on a few weeks notice to replace Khalil Rountree Jr. Anakalev will hope that big win will get him a title shot, but there’s no promises in this game.

The co-main event is Steve Erceg vs. Ramazan Temirov. There’s also Islam Dulatov vs. Wellington Turman, Damian Rzepecki vs. Magomed Zaynukov, Rizvan Kuniev vs. Tyrell Fortune and Ismael Bonfim vs. Axel Sola.

The prelims are headlined by Valter Walker vs. Thomas Petersen. Can Walker get his fifth heel hook in a row?

Last week, as a whole, we did pretty good. Four of us went 11-5 and we all hit our lock picks. I only went 8-8, though. That has cost me my spot atop the leaderboard. Miguel and I are tied on points, but fight pick percentage is the tiebreaker and he’s got me well beat there.

Scroll down to see what we’re all picking this week.

Leader board

UFC Abu Dhabi picks and predictions

Magomed Ankalaev (-535) vs. Bogdan Guskov (+400)

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Well, this sure turned out to be one intensive deep dive of a podcast.

This week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast is all about the financial, legal, and political consequences of the United States/Iranian war in the Middle East and how the damage has forced the investments of very rich governments to converge into consolidation.

Nate wrote about Oracle’s financial peril and its potential to unravel the nascent Ellison Paramount/WBD/TikTok media empire under his Nat Wilson Turner nom de blog, and we referenced that quite a bit in this discussion.

Nat Wilson Turner

Oracle’s Exploding Debt and Plumeting Stock Price Threaten Paramount Media Empire?

The foundations of the hastily assembled Ellison family hasbara media empire — Paramount, WBD, American TikTok — are cracking as Oracle stock has lost $600 billion in market cap since its September 2025 peak and its nearly $200 billion in corporate debt is close to junk bond status…

Read more

8 days ago · 2 likes · Nat Wilson Turner

Ed Zitron has a big update about Oracle’s AI debt bomb and how leveraged Larry Ellison is financially both to AI and Paramount. Turki Alalsheikh and SELA have managed to consolidate the boxing world through Nick Khan and TKO. The biggest fights will happen on Paramount or Netflix, while DAZN has control of the legacy promoters for the rest of the boxing world.

Saudi Arabia is a key financial backer of the Paramount/Warner Brothers Discovery merger deal.

Meanwhile, Mark Shapiro is running wild with his fingerprints all over UFC & WWE matchmaking. Shapiro is not only imposing his sports fandom onto TKO audiences, he’s primarily booking “moments” for his big financial backers like Michael Rubin of Fanatics. On this week’s MMA Draw podcast, we explain the entire Tom Brady/TKO marriage and the role of Silver Lake boss Egon Durban.

The heart of this week’s MMA Draw podcast is all about our go-to streaming expert, The Entertainment Strategy Guy. We recently conducted a Q & A with ESG on a number of your most requested questions regarding UFC on Paramount.

So much of Larry Ellison’s Oracle fortune is tied to Paramount. As Nikkei recently reported, there is a massive off-the-books campaign by the world’s biggest tech companies regarding how much debt is in the dark from investors.

If you want to know how all of this is tied into Paramount and big UFC + Zuffa Boxing fights airing on the Ellisons’ streaming platform, this week’s MMA Draw show is the place to go for prime time storytelling.

It pays to become a paid subscriber to The MMA Draw and this week’s podcast is living proof of listener benefits.

Ways to listen to The MMA Draw podcast

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

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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. Contact Zach: fightopinion at protonmail dot com.

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Remember when Joe Flint of The Wall Street Journal last year reported that Mark Shapiro would be in charge of “freshening up” both UFC & WWE matchmaking?

Turns out that report was 100% accurate. And now we are all paying for it. Dearly.

Mark Shapiro’s explosive tenure at ESPN many decades ago was defined by his obsession with controversy, hot takes, celebrities, and “water cooler” conversation. He still uses the same marketing clichés 25 years later.

It’s why Shapiro was obsessed with hiring Rush Limbaugh for ESPN’s NFL coverage in 2003. When that stunt backfired, Shapiro shamelessly took credit for firing Limbaugh. Got to turn that negative into a positive somehow.

It’s why Mark Shapiro constantly talks about “sampling” and “virality” every chance he gets. It’s why every UFC & WWE show is now infested with “streamers” and influencers you’ve never heard of.

But in the grand scheme of things, Mark Shapiro wouldn’t be pursuing this line of marketing for UFC & WWE if it wasn’t for the two men who serve as his source of power: Ari Emanuel and Egon Durban. It is these two movers-and-shakers, one from Hollywood and one from Silver Lake, who are the puppet masters.

Once you see who is pulling the strings, you can decode exactly why things are playing out the way they are in fight sport, Hollywood, and American sport at-large.

Why would Tom Brady randomly make an ass out of himself and threaten his multi-decade curated media legacy? For the same reasons and motivations that drove John Cena to appear naked at the 2024 Academy Awards.

If you are part of Hollywood, you are going to debase yourself. Hollywood is now running fight sport.

Mark Shapiro’s masters are not you or I. For many years at The MMA Draw, I warned that you are no longer the primary customer. The primary customer is Michael Rubin of Fanatics and his Hamptons White Party. It’s Turki Alalsheikh, who bought Wrestlemania 43 for Saudi Arabia. It’s all of Wall Street who buys (or gets comped) seats at Madison Square Garden events. It’s the major financial institutions who have ownership and incentive to prop up TKO stock.

All of this is a very long-winded of saying that fight fans have never had less power to protest key UFC & WWE decisions. Triple H & Nick Khan have rabbit ears about social media criticism but at the end of the day. everything is guaranteed revenue streams for the next five-to-seven years.

You can’t humiliate billionaires like Ari Emanuel & Mark Shapiro. They just mentally power through criticism and hope to grind you down.

But what you can do is pull their pants down and show that the Emperor has no clothes. Kind of like John Cena at the Academy Awards.

Don’t expect UFC fans to help out this cause. They’ll buy whatever TKO is selling them. UFC fans, at this point, are all-in on whatever TKO gives them. MMA Draw paid subscriber Ed Vidri recently highlighted what a $750 ticket got him for Conor McGregor’s UFC 329 fight.

As long as there are fans willing to supposedly pay $13,700 for a corner stool, you’re not going to stop UFC value extraction.

WWE, however, is a different story. Summerslam 2026 in Minneapolis is exposing the weaknesses in TKO’s grand plan of applying UFC value extraction rules to their other sports and entertainment properties.

It’s going to be wrestling fans who will lead this customer revolt. That’s where Mark Shapiro is making a big mistake in 2026.

You would think that Mark Shapiro would get a clue about his incoming wrestling Waterloo. Instead, he recently doubled-down in an obnoxiously gross Wall Street Journal “interview” with Jason Gay.

After Summerslam 2026, this TKO blame game is going to get very nasty. Who’s going to get scapegoated and lose their job?

Sorry, suckers

Did you pay four figures for a floor seat at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis to go watch Summerslam, not knowing what the WWE card line-up would be for either day of this advertising extravaganza?

Sucks to be you!

Like many Las Vegas fans at Wrestlemania 42 found out, wait before you buy WWE tickets for a tentpole PLE.

Word gets around fast, especially among professional wrestling fans.

Mark Shapiro decided that the TKO blue print for WWE big events was to make them all two-day affairs in stadiums. Sell the circus and grab big government contracts. On paper, the gimmick looks brilliant. Pack the stadiums, charge inflated prices, spam the media broadcasts with not one but two days worth of advertising inventory, and then create Economic Impact Reports touting how much value WWE produced in exchange for the government welfare they received for producing the circus.

As Mark Shapiro recently stated in his WSJ interview with Jason Gay:

“We’ve talked about viewership, sponsorship, marketing, countries that are looking for economic impact. So, they’re willing to pay or give Financial Incentive Packages to bring your circus to town. There’s just no stopping it. And we’re launching stars all the time.”

It’s a brilliant scheme… until fans decide not to show up.

Then you have to come up with another scheme like dynamic pricing to turn humans into seat fillers so that you don’t lose face with the politicians you soaked millions, if not tens of millions of taxpayer dollars out of to bring the TKO circus to town.

We’re now in the phase of fans not being as motivated to show up and pay TKO for the privilege of being a seat filler.

It’s why WWE reportedly introduced $25 gimmick tickets to attend Summerslam in Minneapolis. When you run a stadium with 70,000+ seats, having portions of the stadium tarped like the old Oakland Coliseum is no bueno.

Even if you fill as many seats as possible, you can’t stop the public narrative that your product just isn’t that hot and sexy.

WWE fans are catching on quickly. It’s exposing Mark Shapiro’s flaws.

First and foremost, politicians want to back a winner. The last thing a politician facing crumbling infrastructure or exploding water mains wants to do is face angry voters asking why they spent millions of dollars for TKO when it could have went to a local food bank or school teachers to buy supplies.

Second, what if the fans don’t show up after heavily discounting or paper tickets? Then it serves as a double whammy and confirmation bias that the current WWE product is garbage.

Third and most importantly, it deeply punctures Mark Shapiro’s structural scheme of having major WWE events as two-day affairs. Without two-day affairs, it shrinks the economic footprint for value extraction.

Take Summerslam 2026 for example. ESPN paid $1.6 billion dollars for five years worth of WWE Premium Live Events. So far, WWE fan reaction to ESPN Unlimited has been less than enthusiastic. Not a lot of people want to pay $30 a month for Unlimited.

On top of that pay wall, there is non-stop advertisement spamming. Two day events means double the advertising inventory.

What happens if there are less viewers because it’s ESPN? How much money would TKO lose out of on if they had to revert back to one-day shows? That’s the core problem with Mark Shapiro’s value extraction tactics. He can’t go back and re-calibrate.

Two day WWE PLEs allow TKO to massage production costs on the books. Going back to one-day PLEs would also shrink the value of the government contracts they sign. It would also scale back the money TKO gets in media rights fees from broadcasters like ESPN. This would undercut TKO’s tax credits and government welfare goodies.

As WWE’s customer demand softens, these compounding complications are going to create conditons to ignite a blame game. Mark Shapiro is going to have to try to save face somehow.

Mark Shapiro’s “freshening up” of WWE

Don’t let TKO get away with dumping all of WWE’s matchmaking problems on Triple H. Yes, he’s milquetoast… and “safe”… and boring… and formulaic.

But at the end of the day, Mark Shapiro’s fingerprints are all over this current WWE product.

Watch the first ten minutes of Shapiro’s recent WSJ video interview with Jason Gay. He can’t and won’t shut up about The New York Knicks winning the NBA Finals.

Mark Shapiro and Ari Emanuel were court side — and on camera — for the NBA Finals. The same week as the UFC Freedom 250 White House event.

Guess what has been a key theme on WWE programming the last couple of months? The New York Knicks. The cross-over between Fanatics and the Knicks is all about Mark Shapiro. It is Shapiro who is imposing his personal sports fandom onto WWE sports and celebrity “sampling” of athlete cameos for “virality.” Just writing that sentence makes me want to take a shower.

Mark Shapiro is living out his personal sports fantasy and is imposing it on UFC & WWE broadcasts. It’s insufferable.

Enter Tom Brady.

If you haven’t already figured out the plot, let me explain why Tom Brady is in the TKO picture.

• Tom Brady is involved with The Las Vegas Raiders franchise.

• Egon Durban, the man behind Silver Lake (which finances TKO), is the number one minority owner of The Las Vegas Raiders.

• Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro both recently acquired small stakes in The Las Vegas Raiders.

• Lawrence Epstein, the long-time in-house attorney for the UFC, happens to be on the board of directors for Allegiant Stadium (where the Raiders play their games.)

• Dana White is long-time friends with Tom Brady.

• Tom Brady gets paid a lot of money as the number one color commentator on Fox for NFL broadcasts.

Tom Brady is embedded deeply inside the worlds of TKO and Hollywood. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this photo of Brady & Durban together at the 2026 College Football finals at Hard Rock Stadium in South Florida tells the story.

When there’s panic in the world of TKO, Ari Emanuel & Mark Shapiro call on their Hollywood and sports clients to try to hotshot last-minute ticket sales.

We saw this disastrous experiment with Pat McAfee at Wrestlemania 42 and now we’re seeing it play out with Tom Brady rumors swirling.

Why would Tom Brady play ball with Mark Shapiro and engage in a public feud with Logan Paul? Yes, Brady is ultimately going to go along with whatever marketing ideas Shapiro, Durban, Emanuel, and Rubin push. However, there may be another factor at play.

Wrestlemania 43 is in Saudi Arabia. Turki Alalshikh and the Saudi GEA (General Entertainment Authority) agreed to financially back an NFL flag football series. Michael Rubin and Fanatics are heavily involved. Fox Sports is broadcasting the NFL flag football series. Tom Brady did a press conference with Turki Alalshikh to advertise the flag football venture.

Then the US conflict with Iran exploded. The NFL relocated the first flag football event from Saudi Arabia to Los Angeles because of the war. The Kingdom was pissed that the flag football games didn’t happen in Saudi Arabia. On April 15, Front Office Sports reported that the Saudis would pull their financial support on the NFL flag football venture.

Logan Paul and Tom Brady started a public feud at the Los Angeles flag football exhibition.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

There is incentive with TKO, Fanatics, Paul, and Brady to keep a long-term public feud brewing for an eventual showdown. Perhaps at Wrestlemania 43, which would make Turki very happy.

Again, you are no longer the primary customer. The insiders are. Once you see who is pulling the strings, you can never miss it.

It’s why I call out so many in the media — who know better — for their Great Pretending.

The problem for TKO? Nobody is really all that interested in seeing Tom Brady in a WWE-centric role. This is all about amusing the money marks in TKO’s social and business circles.

Mark Shapiro’s antipathy for “B and C level” markets

What Summerslam 2026 in Minneapolis is exposing is that the kinds of marketing shenanigans TKO can pull off in bigger cities like New York City, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles is not entirely compatible with the rest of the America.

Mark Shapiro famously stated on a December 2023 conference call that if the Heartland wants TKO events, those cities and their elected leaders would have to overpay to bring the circus to town.

TKO motivated politicians to overpay for their events. Now TKO have to deliver sellouts. The problem? They can’t achieve 100% of their promised deliverables.

Part of the problem is that the influencer audience that TKO relies upon has no desire to travel to “B and C level” markets. Celebrities only want to be seen in certain locations. As Mark Shapiro recently admitted in last week’s WSJ interview, most of WME’s celebrity clientele rejected their invites to go the UFC White House event.

If those celebrities won’t go and be seen at The White House, why would they want to go to Minneapolis unless they’re paid an insane amount of money for an appearance fee? It’s the same problem the NBA has had for decades when they hold All Star events in places like Utah that the elite consider “undesirable” for their travel tastes.

Plus, things don’t always go as smoothly as planned once TKO decides to bring the circus to town. The UFC Noche event on September 12th in Arizona is reportedly being moved to the morning to accommodate the evening Paramount+ broadcast of Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn. Some events are more equal than others in TKO World.

The growing problem for Mark Shapiro is that ticket sales are not only softening up for WWE in “B and C level” markets but also in their prime A-level markets.

Saturday Night’s Main Event at MSG over the weekend for WWE was reportedly not a sellout. The upcoming Zuffa Boxing event at The Felt Forum at MSG reportedly has embarrassing ticket sales for both Richardson Hitchins and Edgar Berlanga fighting. Summerslam 2026 is far from a sellout.

Bottom line? The MMA Draw warned TKO that WWE fans are not UFC fans. UFC fans are the most gullible sharks. The bro vote and Barstool Bros will pay for pretty much anything. WWE is not the same demographic, no matter how much you charge or upsell them. There are less and less families going now because Mark Shapiro said he was tired of Vince McMahon’s ticket pricing “for the families”. Those undesirables in TKO world, however, are still a core WWE American societal demographic.

Studying Mark Shapiro’s multi-decade track record, he will undoubtedly take away all the wrong reasons if Summerslam ends up disappointing in Minneapolis.

Like his ill-fated decision to hire Rush Limbaugh for NFL coverage at ESPN, Mark Shapiro will always find fall guys to make an example out of in order to protect his job. At his core, Shapiro is still the same obnoxious hot take/celebrity worship guy that he was at ESPN. The same faux Private Equity high energy cliché-ridden MBA buzzword barker who continues his insanely lucrative shtick unchallenged because so many people are scared to death to call out Ari Emanuel.

The only relief for WWE fans is to get counted outside of the stadium rather than in it.

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.

If you know the history of American television, you also know that combat sports is often a leading indicator of the future.

In the 1940s & 1950s, Gorgeous George became one of television’s first wrestling superstars through appearances on DuMont and other early TV networks. Classy Freddie Blassie terrified pencil-neck geeks in Los Angeles on KTLA. Rikidozan shattered Japanese TV records in the 1950s & 1960s. Vince McMahon Sr. syndicated his World Wide Wrestling Federation TV show via WOR in New York in the 1970s. Vince McMahon Jr. would expand this strategy to include nationwide syndication in the 1980s. HBO aired WWF matches from Madison Square Garden. Joe Blanchard’s Southwest Championship Wrestling had a high-profile TV show on USA Network in the early 1980s. Vince McMahon would soon take over that slot with Prime Time Wrestling.

Then came the advent of Pay Per View and Wrestlemania during the launch of MTV. Hulkamania was running wild. Mike Tyson became a legend.

The 1990s saw PPV expand beyond wrestling into boxing mega-fights via TVKO and eventually the UFC.

Vince McMahon changed cable on Monday Nights with RAW and Eric Bischoff raised the stakes with live Monday Nitro wrestling events.

McMahon won the wrestling wars and eventually became a billionaire (on paper) while turning WWE into a publicly-traded company.

Then McMahon made his biggest gamble ever — The WWE Network. What on earth was he thinking?

Turns out, Vince was always ahead of the game. We have an 80-plus year track record of fight sports being a bleeding edge of new media rights deals and technological invention.

Guess who had key inside access to some of the important media rights data for fight sports over the last two decades? Ari Emanuel. The personal agent for both Vince McMahon and Donald Trump also represented the UFC when they signed their major media rights deal with Fox Sports in 2011.

Five years later, Ari Emanuel and Endeavor bought the UFC for $4 billion dollars.

This is a very long-winded but historically accurate way of saying that you can’t tell the story of American media without discussing combat sports.

This is why the future of UFC on Paramount means so much for all of us.

As Zach recently outlined, TKO has created a multi-monopoly with the largest streaming platforms. This includes Zuffa Boxing on Paramount and RAW on Netflix.

If TKO succeeds as a linchpin for Paramount’s footprint expansion globally, it will have big ramifications for future media rights deals and potential investment in the combat sports space.

We can’t tell you what the future is going to look like, but we can certainly call on our go-to expert to tell us what the current streaming environment looks like. Enter our number one expert, The Entertainment Strategy Guy.

For our paid subscribers, Nate recently had a chance to sit down with ESG to ask our most requested reader questions about UFC, Paramount, the Freedom 250 event at The White House, Conor McGregor’s return, Ari Emanuel’s maneuvers, and whether or not Paramount can eventually remove political branding as part of its core identity.

After our Q & A session, Zach will have his response to ESG’s answers and how the recent Freedom 250 & Conor McGregor UFC 329 viewership numbers fit into the bigger picture.

Your questions & ESG’s answers regarding UFC on Paramount

Entertainment Strategy Guy: First off, thank you for asking me these smart questions. I’m a big, big fan of The MMA Draw’s coverage. I never would have guessed that I needed an MMA/fight sports newsletter in my life, but I read every issue because the analysis and business coverage is so good. So I’m happy to share what I know with your readers.

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The UFC is in Oklahoma this weekend with a card that is light on fights and light on name value. The main event is Dricus du Plessis vs. Kamaru Usman. This is Usman’s middleweight debut. I suppose this is somewhat interesting, given these are two somewhat recent champs. Still… not a lot of buzz for this one, is there?

The rest of the card is pretty dire. The co-main is 42 year-old Jared Cannonier vs. Christian Leroy Duncan. The main card also includes Tommy McMillen vs. Alberto Montes. Both those guys are one fight removed from the Contender Series. Chase Hooper vs. Mitch Ramirez is also on the main card. Ramirez hasn’t fought in about two years.

The prelims have two guys coming off lengthy PED bans. There is Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani vs. Seokheon Ko, though. That should be good.

At last week’s UFC 329, we did really well. Miguel, Stephie and Kristen all went 16-3. That has put Miguel and Stephie right behind me on the leader board. I’ve been fighting them off thanks to my high percentage on lock picks (19-2), but that might not save me for much longer.

Scroll down to see who we all have this week.

Leader board

UFC Oklahoma City picks and predictions

Dricus du Plessis (-218) vs. Kamaru Usman (+195)

Picking Du Plessis: Nate Wilcox, William Watts, Blaine Henry
Picking Usman: Miguel Class, Stephie Haynes, Kristen King, Tim Edwards

Picking Over 4.5 rounds: Miguel, Stephie, Nate, Kristen, Blaine, Tim
Picking Under 4.5 rounds: William

Jared Cannonier (+285) vs. Christian Leroy Duncan (-360)

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Paid subscribers to The MMA Draw newsletter got a heads up about TKO rushing to accelerate their takeover of boxing. Right on cue, we got fresh new evidence of how fast their game plan is changing.

If you haven’t already listened to this week’s MMA Draw podcast, check it out.

Over the last couple of weeks, the worst kept industry secret was that Paramount+ would be the landing spot for Conor Benn vs. Ryan Garcia fight. September 12th in Las Vegas.

Look carefully at the top of the mock-up fight poster. DAZN. Paramount Plus. Ring. Zuffa Boxing. Golden Boy.

DAZN will air the fight in the UK & Ireland while Paramount+ will air Garcia vs. Benn globally.

Dana White wanted to announce this fight a long time ago. What changed? Lots of things changed behind the scenes. A rumored management shake-up at DAZN. A change in strategy for SELA & TKO.

It doesn’t matter if TKO gets the Ali Revival Act passed in Congress or not at this point. If they get it passed, it will be the proverbial cherry on top of the monopolization sundae.

Besides, who is going to politically or legally enforce any potential current Ali Act violations against TKO? No one.

Stunningly, many of the key players in global boxing have little to no comprehension about what has just taken place under their noses. So, let’s spell out what the boxing terrain truly looks like now.

DAZN is the official boxing subcontractor for streaming

The biggest misconception is that DAZN is working against the interests of TKO and SELA. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

With all the major legacy non-Japanese boxing promoters under the DAZN umbrella, two key benchmarks are at play.

For DAZN, consolidation of boxing talent. Everything is tied into the DAZN silo. The promoters. Some big-name boxers.

But wait a second. How can DAZN afford this? They are continuing to lose money, right? Len Blavatnik is making some reported financial maneuvers in The Caymans. Per The Financial Times:

An executive familiar with the reorganisation said it would not mean a change to Access Industries’ ownership of DAZN. But the person added that the move was “intended to optimise the group’s corporate structure and enhance its flexibility to pursue future strategic and financing opportunities, including potential capital raises and a possible public listing”. The executive cautioned that no decision had yet been made on any IPO or its timeline.

DAZN now has a clean story to sell to future financiers. They are the Home of Boxing.

But wait, what about Zuffa Boxing? What about Netflix?

DAZN has officially positioned itself now as the global boxing subcontractor for streaming platforms. They will have rights to their boxing fights on the Ultimate Tier platform. However, DAZN will be producing monthly cards for TNT. The same TNT that is soon to become a Paramount property if David Ellison can fight off recently-filed antitrust litigation by California & New York.

(More on Paramount fight politics in a future article on The MMA Draw with our favorite streaming analyst, The Entertainment Strategy Guy.)

The July 4th fight in Cleveland was a successful trial run for DAZN as a streaming subcontractor. That fight on TNT drew a reported 661,000 viewers. Everything went pretty smoothly. It was a glimpse into the future.

DAZN will have plenty of boxing inventory and will be positioned to produce boxing inventory for other streamers. Building brand awareness on larger media platforms while positioning themselves as a content provider in live combat sports.

For TKO, DAZN is a very expensive boxing version of Fight Pass.

The biggest boxing fights will air on either Paramount or Netflix. During the Home Run Derby on Monday night, Netflix advertised the Anthony Joshua vs. Tyson Fury fight despite not having a date or venue booked.

Netflix has been receiving plenty of polarizing fan reaction regarding their vision and production of sports content.

Paramount and Netflix will have rights to the biggest fights. Natural tension will be created by two highly motivated streaming actors needing live sports content. A perfect business scenario for Ari Emanuel.

TKO will have access to DAZN’s top boxing talent and producers.

Dana White will become the face of boxing sooner rather than later thanks to Paramount and TKO politics. That works just fine for Nick Khan and Lawrence Epstein who are both busy working in the shadows.

Turki’s big U-Turn towards Zuffa Boxing

Ever since Turki Alalsheikh’s attempted boxing “peace summit” in London, the narrative has curiously changed regarding Saudi involvement in boxing.

Sure, there’s the wildly strange undercard fight announcements for Anthony Joshua’s July 25th fight in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

However, the main talking point from the Kingdom’s big man of boxing has been about his proud ownership role in Zuffa Boxing.

“We own 60% of Zuffa.”

Funny how the politics and fog of war involving the United States and Iran has changed everyone’s financial calculus.

Now the focus is on making money. Turki’s rather conciliatory tone towards the American marketplace interests of Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua has been begging for a very late start time at Wembley Stadium. It’s all about having this fight air on Netflix in prime time.

Except Fury vs. Joshua is entirely a UK fight. If it lands in New York at MSG, it will draw. If it lands in Las Vegas, it might draw. It just won’t draw the same audience as Wembley Stadium.

Point being, the financial considerations of media entities like Paramount and Netflix matters a whole lot in July 2026 for Turki Alalsheikh.

Remember, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is part of a motley contingent of financiers bundled to finance Paramount’s purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery assets.

Turki wants Netflix to help finance his biggest boxing fights. If it isn’t Netflix, it will be Paramount.

TKO has media deals with Netflix, Paramount, and Sky Sports. In conjunction with DAZN, TKO is now gaining control of the industry’s process through financing, media, and talent.

In life, there’s the process and substance silos. TKO is always about controlling the plumbing.

What’s the next move for Eddie Hearn?

In this brave new world, there will be a few survivors.

Matchroom Boxing. Queensberry. Zuffa Boxing. Then everyone else (excluding Japan).

Dana White and Nick Khan are quickly utilizing the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts strategy on Eddie Hearn. Poaching Conor Benn destroyed Eddie’s psyche before he recovered and managed to win the public relations battle.

Then TKO landed a deal with Sky Sports. TKO just signed Heavyweight Johnny Fisher from Matchroom and booked him for the upcoming ZBXG event at Copper Box.

Matchroom Boxing can’t afford to get into a financial pissing contest with TKO. Too much firepower.

It isn’t as if Matchroom is poor or broke. However, their reported negotiations with the Saudis over darts and snooker fell apart. Then came the most under-reported non-TKO business story of the year: Bruin Capital’s purchase of a 15% stake in Matchroom.

The Private Equity bean counters are now in the room.

Which means that Matchroom is going to have to get smarter about talent development and recruitment. The recent announcement of a Matchroom club boxing Project Series on DAZN tells you everything you need to know.

Zuffa Boxing has their garage. Eddie Hearn has Caribe Royale in Orlando. What’s old is new again.

The window before TKO monopolizes the American boxing industry is, at best, a few years. Nick Khan is quickly raising the stakes on how much money it will take any newcomers to enter into the boxing space as a major player.

TKO’s focus has been locking down the American marketplace in 2026. They just signed America’s best boxer, Shakur Stevenson. Whether or not TKO has a proper slate of opponents for Mr. Stevenson remains to be seen.

The larger purpose for TKO is to address the concerns of their current and future financiers by demonstrating that they have a master plan. They just signed the best boxer in the United States. Hey, Wall Street, put your money into this future boxing monopoly. TKO currently has two monopolies in UFC & WWE. Boxing is the third leg of this triple crown.

The marriage between Paramount, TKO, and DAZN to reach an agreement on Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn is a perfect encapsulation of how quickly and easily Zuffa is gaining global control of all fight sports. Depressingly so.

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.

It’s not your fault if you got sucked into the Conor McGregor vortex. At least it wasn’t on PPV.

Besides, Benoit Saint Denis’ performance against Paddy Pimblett was far more depressing.

This week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast focuses on the current state of affairs for the UFC Lightweight division after UFC 329’s fight results.

Are you interested in Paddy Pimblett vs. Ilia Topuria? How about Max Holloway vs. Arman Tsarukyan?

There are lots of unresolved questions from UFC 329 week to answer.

We want your feedback to this week’s podcast. Leave us a comment and tell us what you think of this week’s show.

For our paid subscribers, we talk all about TKO’s all-in strategy on Zuffa Boxing as a growth story. Mark Shapiro needs this talking point on Wall Street because the value extraction of WWE fans for Summerslam in Minneapolis is not reportedly going according to plan.

Thanks to the fountain of (mis)information known as ChatGPT, take a look at the last four weeks of Netflix ratings numbers for WWE RAW.

With WWE business softening, TKO’s timeline to take over boxing has plenty of incentive for acceleration.

Dana White asked the public to judge Zuffa Boxing at the end of the year by who they sign and how many cards they produce.

Right on cue, there is significant consolidation in the boxing industry with both Turki Alalshikh/TKO and DAZN.

Some of the big questions we address on this week’s MMA Draw podcast:

• Why the Shakur Stevenson signing and Netflix confirmation of Anthony Joshua vs. Tyson Fury is a big credibility boost, especially if that fight happens in Las Vegas

• What is happening behind the scenes with the various delays in announcing Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn and how a certain boxing Twitter account may have revealed a much bigger story regarding Paramount’s potential involvement

• Is DAZN being positioned as TKO’s boxing version of Fight Pass? Will DAZN end up being a permanent boxing subcontractor for all other major streaming media platforms?

• Why Zuffa Boxing is able to continue with their consolidation plans regardless as to whether or not the US Senate passes the Ali Revival Act

When it comes to TKO, you can’t simply talk about one piece of their combat sports portfolio. They are constantly tying WWE, UFC, and Zuffa Boxing business headlines into one consolidated, corporate package. Synergy.

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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Article updated July 12, 2026, to include quotes from Dana White.

The old war horse got shot and sent to the glue factory at UFC 329. It only took 69 seconds.

It sucks to be one of the many paying customers who spent 4-figures for a ticket, but Ari Emanuel managed to steal a major house and Max Holloway got the easiest payday of his very hardened and weathered fighting life.

(“Stealing a house” is an old professional wrestling term for getting a big box office with a short-term gimmick.)

Conor McGregor is done. Finished. Kaput. Go home. This circus is over.

Are we really surprised that it ended in this manner?

Today’s UFC customer is paying to see a knockout or dramatic finish. Technique be damned. They got none of that. Given the heavy reliance on gambling to capture their current audience, you could see why there was such nervousness and trepidation from Joe Rogan & Daniel Cormier on the Paramount broadcast.

The MMA Draw is not soft as Charmin when it comes to raising the tough topics and hard-hitting questions.

Way too big

The first warning sign of trouble for Conor McGregor was agreeing to fight at 170 pounds against Max Holloway.

The former Featherweight champion is fighting at 170 when he should be fighting at 145 or 155. Why?

Simply put, Conor McGregor was physically too big for this fight. Given the grizzly left leg injury he suffered in his last UFC fight, there should have been motivation to fight smaller rather than bigger.

During the Paramount broadcast, UFC hinted that something may have been wrong with Conor McGregor’s right leg when he slipped out of his shoes to enter the Octagon. This deserves much more scrutiny into what UFC management knew and when.

Addendum: Here is what Conor McGregor had to say after his UFC 329 fight.

Once the fight started, McGregor’s bizarre attempts at jumping high kicks — while slipping and sliding — were alarmingly stupid. Holloway simply side-stepped and got out of the way.

McGregor planting hard on his right leg — as Dr. Brian Sutterer pointed out in the embedded YouTube video of this article — was inevitably going to cause a meniscus or ACL injury.

It looked so bad initially that I thought he may have popped his Achilles. Flashbacks to the Carlos Ulberg injury at UFC 327 in Miami. What a driven and determined athlete to finish that fight with no ACL.

Ant Evans, former UFC PR master and frequent critic of today’s product, wasted no time in pointing at a certain behavioral trait as a potential contributory culprit.

“Cocaine destroys cartilage, bone and soft tissue.”

That’s a hell of an accusation by Ant. Is it true?

First and foremost, we know that Conor McGregor admitted in court testimony for the Nikita Hand sexual assault trial that he used cocaine the night of the incident in question. In 2025, Joe Rogan discussed Conor McGregor’s cocaine usage on his show and cited it as a reason why he was skeptical of McGregor’s return to the Octagon.

What does the medical literature and research say about cocaine usage in relation to bone and cartilage health? Here’s a bibliography of recent articles:

• The landscape of cocaine cytotoxicity and the role of sigma-1 receptor modulation and adulterant synergism (May 2026)

• The role of illicit drugs in developing medication-related osteonecrosis (MRONJ): a systematic review (May 2021)

• Cocaine-induced midline destructive lesions - An autoimmune disease? (Mayo Clinic)

• Cocaine: Pathophysiology and clinical toxicology (Science Direct)

You get the picture. No one can factually argue that Conor McGregor’s prior cocaine usage equals brittle bones. Certainly not as a primary cause. However, it is legally fair to question whether or not Mr. McGregor’s previous drug usage was a contributory factor to his recent injury history. That is fair game for public debate.

The larger, more demonstrably solid argument one can make is that Conor McGregor simply was fighting at too big of a weight class at a time when his limbs needed less body mass rather than more. His joints and ligaments needed less stress.

The problem with making this argument is too rational or too unemotional to make. When it comes to Conor McGregor, everyone wants to encompass his entire legal, social, and medical history in regards to analyzing his fighting performance. It’s hard not to.

The stench of scandal

UFC 329 was a very unique card for a whole host of reasons. Coming off of the political stench of the UFC White House event, the return of Conor McGregor and UFC debut of Gable Steveson certainly was a choice.

What was also a choice was watching more celebrities — including female fans — feeling that it was safer to be seen at a Conor McGregor fight than being seen with US President Donald Trump.

Given the various prior sexual assault allegations against Mr. McGregor, Mr. Steveson, Mr. Trump, and Mike Tyson, let’s just say that it didn’t seem to bother the current UFC fan all that much.

Mike Tyson is easily the biggest babyface of the four men mentioned. He was criminally convicted and served jail time.

Consider the lot of Paramount celebrities that attended UFC 329. Taylor Sheridan. Mel Gibson. Vince Vaughn. David Ellison, head honcho of Paramount.

Sophie Cunningham hyped the crowd into a frenzy and also had a cameo as a UFC ring card girl. What a worker.

But on a night of many celebrities involved in high-profile scandals, it was the UFC unwittingly outing themselves on perhaps knowing about Conor McGregor having an injury heading into the UFC 329 main event that deserves your real scorn attention.

Addendum: There is no way that UFC would engage in a fixed or rigged fight regarding Conor McGregor. The stakes are too high.

A promotion based in Las Vegas that pushes Bet365, DraftKings, and Polymarket despite Nevada recently getting an injunction to stop Polymarket activity in their state.

A promotion that pushes gimmicked juiced (e.g. +725 to +900) Bet365 parlays and non-stop betting to prop up any semblance of audience for their APEX warehouse fights is looking at you, disappointed that they made a $26.4 million gate at T-Mobile Arena while poor Conor McGregor got hurt. As if they are innocent bystanders. Whenever anything goes wrong, UFC always cosplays being the bystanders. They love to channel their inner Sgt. Schultz.

Addendum: Dana White was asked in the UFC 329 post-fight press conference about whether he had prior knowledge of Conor McGregor being injured. Here was his response.

Q: “[McGregor] had a hard time putting on his sneakers. Could he have been injured before the fight?”

DANA WHITE: “I have no idea. That I don’t know. I mean, the day of the press conference, he came running out of the back and ran right up to him and stopped abruptly and squared off with him. They were pushing foreheads.”

Q: “I just wondered if something happened in the last 24 hours. I don’t see it on the actual landing of that fight.”

DANA: “I wouldn’t know that but I didn’t see, you know, the doctors checked him out before the fight and he looked damned good at the press conference and he looked fine at the weigh-ins.”

Q: “The question of getting paid as you step in the cage.”

DANA: “Listen, if anybody saw anything that could have possibly made him look weak or injured leading up to this fight, I mean, what the fuck did the face off do, 44 million in 24 hours? More than 44 million views. Somebody would have saw something. Anybody see something? If they did, they didn’t say it. Which is impossible that nobody would do that.”

But how many of the fans who paid thousands of dollars for seats at UFC 329 are going to blame Ari Emanuel or Dana White? Maybe a handful. Maybe. All the heat will be on Conor McGregor. That works perfectly fine for UFC.

Put this old horse out of pasture. Just like the rest of them.

The end of legacy MMA fights as a marketing gimmick

The stench of Ronda Rousey smoking Gina Carano in 20 seconds with an armbar and Conor McGregor trashing his lower extremities in a minute will put an end to the 2026 love affair of washed-up legends fighting in MMA.

I thought we already were past this trend with Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz III promoted by Golden Boy in 2018. I guess not.

It’s a shame that the older legacy fighters have most of the star power, but that is the feature of Mark Shapiro’s value extraction system. UFC is the star. Who else would be able to generate a $26M gate for a Conor McGregor return?

Conor McGregor wanted to burn the last two fights on his UFC contract to perhaps find greener pastures on Netflix or another streamer. Maybe Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian could have squeezed out a mega-fight on Netflix. Not anymore. That is over.

Does Conor McGregor need the money? Who knows.

Conor McGregor spent UFC 329 fight week talking about how he drowned himself in alcohol because a bunch of inventory was in his garage. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him? As we recently discussed on The MMA Draw podcast, Conor McGregor’s fortunes seem intertwined with Floyd Mayweather’s failure to maintain his fortune. One would hope for Conor’s sake that he managed to keep his wealth, but who knows? Between a high-flying lifestyle, the Nikita Hand civil case, and other various business ventures, cash flow may be necessary. We just don’t know.

But now the biggest question is whether or not Conor McGregor can make it for one more fight. He is certainly going to try. Max Holloway was trying to placate a very angry and dejected crowd by hyping up a trilogy fight. Good luck selling that one.

Conor McGregor survived a catastrophic left leg injury and got two New York Times articles accusing him of steroid and HGH usage. He’s now suffered an embarrassing right leg injury that could permanently end his career. Is there a market left that wants to pay to watch Conor McGregor? Given the verdict in the Nikita Hand sexual assault trial, it’s highly unlikely that such an audience would be found in Europe.

Conor McGregor did receive a nice reaction from the Las Vegas crowd, but you would be hard-pressed to find many Irish fans in attendance. Mr. McGregor wrapped the flag of Ireland around himself all week long, including two gimmicked UFC title belts in his native country’s colors.

Paddy Pimblett, coming off of a brutal loss to Justin Gaethje, had a much stronger crowd reaction. Pimblett’s quick finish of Benoit St. Denis may have very well saved UFC 329 from being an average show to at least a show with a good talking point for future dream matches for Napoleon Blownapart’s favorite Scouser.

Bottom line? Between Conor’s UFC 329 debacle and a slimmed-down Gina Carano smiling after losing in 20 seconds, the modern MMA fan in 2026 has had just about enough of seeing the legends they happened to miss before their current MMA fandom started.

Bad fights can stink up the joint in combat sports, but anti-climactic finishes are real audience killers. UFC 329 was defined more by what was missing rather than what was present.

A night of missed opportunities

Zuffa Boxing just signed Shakur Stevenson, America’s best boxer, to a brand new contract. And, right on cue, the UFC production team screwed up Stevenson’s on-screen cameo. The wrong name and identifier. Spent maybe five seconds highlighting the greatest prize fighter that ZBXG has signed.

Whoever came up with ZBXG for marketing should be demoted or fired. Especially with those ridiculous Zuffa Boxing branded snuggies. And whoever is in charge of promoting the upcoming ZBXG event at The Felt Forum at MSG needs to get a fire under their ass because this is beyond lame and lackluster marketing for a show featuring Edgar Berlanga and Richardson Hitchins.

The long-rumored Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn fight was not announced at UFC 329. Despite these fighters appearing at UFC 329 weigh-ins, it appears that both Oscar De La Hoya (Golden Boy) and DAZN are raising potential contractual questions about Zuffa Boxing’s role in promoting this fight. Perhaps that is why Dana White was less than happy at times during UFC 329 fight week.

And then there was this cherry on top of the sloppy UFC production team work product:

There were a lot of missed opportunities at UFC 329.

Terrence McKinney absolutely should have submitted Bobby “King” Green. It was completely inexplicable that the much faster, quicker, and sharper striker lost that fight. Watching a much faster and sharper striker in Lone’er Kavanaugh lose to Brandon Royval was depressing. That was entirely a winnable fight on the ground. Robert Whittaker looked OK at Light Heavyweight, but Joe Rogan was doing his best “ooh, baby, you fat” impersonation. Whittaker had trouble with Nikita Krylov’s size at first, but Krylov displayed little defensive prowess and got his jaw smashed into oblivion.

Then there was Gable Stevenson. It was what it was. I’m still surprised he wasn’t on the main card.

As with the previous UFC on Paramount events in 2026, the pacing on the main card absolutely dragged. Ari Emanuel was everywhere on his headset. UFC is an advertising company disguised as a fight promotion.

They have lots of inventory to sell. I’m sure we will all be watching. The circus must continue. But not everyone will leave happy, especially after UFC 329. At some point, at some point, the cumulative value extraction has to add up. So far, it hasn’t.

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.

Article updated July 12, 2026.

The old war horse got shot and sent to the glue factory at UFC 329. It only took 69 seconds.

It sucks to be one of the many paying customers who spent 4-figures for a ticket, but Ari Emanuel managed to steal a major house and Max Holloway got the easiest payday of his very hardened and weathered fighting life.

(“Stealing a house” is an old professional wrestling term for getting a big box office with a short-term gimmick.)

Conor McGregor is done. Finished. Kaput. Go home. This circus is over.

Are we really surprised that it ended in this manner?

Today’s UFC customer is paying to see a knockout or dramatic finish. Technique be damned. They got none of that. Given the heavy reliance on gambling to capture their current audience, you could see why there was such nervousness and trepidation from Joe Rogan & Daniel Cormier on the Paramount broadcast.

Way too big

The first warning sign of trouble for Conor McGregor was agreeing to fight at 170 pounds against Max Holloway.

The former Featherweight champion is fighting at 170 when he should be fighting at 145 or 155? Why?

Simply put, Conor McGregor was physically too big for this fight. Given the grizzly left leg injury he suffered in his last UFC fight, there should have been motivation to fight smaller rather than bigger.

On the Paramount broadcast, UFC was hinting that something may have been wrong with Conor McGregor’s right leg when he was slipping out of his shoes to enter the Octagon. This deserves a lot more scrutiny about what UFC management knew and when.

Addendum: Here is what Conor McGregor had to say after his UFC 329 fight.

Once the fight started, McGregor’s bizarre attempts at jumping high kicks — while slipping and sliding — were alarmingly stupid. Holloway simply side-stepped and got out of the way.

McGregor planting hard on his right leg — as Dr. Brian Sutterer pointed out in the embedded YouTube video of this article — was inevitably going to cause a meniscus or ACL injury.

It looked so bad initially that I thought he may have popped his Achilles. Flashbacks to the Carlos Ulberg injury at UFC 327 in Miami. What a driven and determined athlete to finish that fight with no ACL.

Ant Evans, former UFC PR master and frequent critic of today’s product, wasted no time in pointing at a certain behavioral trait as a potential contributory culprit.

“Cocaine destroys cartilage, bone and soft tissue.”

That’s a hell of an accusation by Ant. Is it true?

First and foremost, we know that Conor McGregor admitted in court testimony for the Nikita Hand sexual assault trial that he used cocaine the night of the incident in question. In 2025, Joe Rogan discussed Conor McGregor’s cocaine usage on his show and cited it as a reason why he was skeptical of McGregor’s return to the Octagon.

What does the medical literature and research say about cocaine usage in relation to bone and cartilage health? Here’s a bibliography of recent articles:

• The landscape of cocaine cytotoxicity and the role of sigma-1 receptor modulation and adulterant synergism (May 2026)

• The role of illicit drugs in developing medication-related osteonecrosis (MRONJ): a systematic review (May 2021)

• Cocaine-induced midline destructive lesions - An autoimmune disease? (Mayo Clinic)

• Cocaine: Pathophysiology and clinical toxicology (Science Direct)

You get the picture. No one can factually argue that Conor McGregor’s prior cocaine usage equals brittle bones. Certainly not as a primary cause. However, it is legally fair to question whether or not Mr. McGregor’s previous drug usage was a contributory factor to his recent injury history. That is fair game for public debate.

The larger, more demonstrably solid argument one can make is that Conor McGregor simply was fighting at too big of a weight class at a time when his limbs needed less body mass rather than more. His joints and ligaments needed less stress.

The problem with making this argument is too rational or too unemotional to make. When it comes to Conor McGregor, everyone wants to encompass his entire legal, social, and medical history in regards to analyzing his fighting performance. It’s hard not to.

The stench of scandal

UFC 329 was a very unique card for a whole host of reasons. Coming off of the political stench of the UFC White House event, the return of Conor McGregor and UFC debut of Gable Steveson certainly was a choice.

What was also a choice was watching more celebrities — including female fans — feeling that it was safer to be seen at a Conor McGregor fight than being seen with US President Donald Trump.

Given the various prior sexual assault allegations against Mr. McGregor, Mr. Steveson, Mr. Trump, and Mike Tyson, let’s just say that it didn’t seem to bother the current UFC fan all that much.

Mike Tyson is easily the biggest babyface of the four men mentioned. He was criminally convicted and served jail time.

Consider the lot of Paramount celebrities that attended UFC 329. Taylor Sheridan. Mel Gibson. Vince Vaughn. David Ellison, head honcho of Paramount.

Sophie Cunningham hyped the crowd into a frenzy and also had a cameo as a UFC ring card girl. What a worker.

But on a night of many celebrities involved in high-profile scandals, it was the UFC unwittingly outing themselves on perhaps knowing about Conor McGregor having an injury heading into the UFC 329 main event that deserves your real scorn attention.

Addendum: There is no way that UFC would engage in a fixed or rigged fight regarding Conor McGregor. The stakes are too high.

A promotion based in Las Vegas that pushes Bet365, DraftKings, and Polymarket despite Nevada recently getting an injunction to stop Polymarket activity in their state.

A promotion that pushes gimmicked juiced (e.g. +725 to +900) Bet365 parlays and non-stop betting to prop up any semblance of audience for their APEX warehouse fights is looking at you, disappointed that they made a $26.4 million gate at T-Mobile Arena while poor Conor McGregor got hurt. As if they are innocent bystanders. Whenever anything goes wrong, UFC always cosplays being the bystanders. They love to channel their inner Sgt. Schultz.

Addendum: Dana White was asked in the UFC 329 post-fight press conference about whether he had prior knowledge of Conor McGregor being injured. Here was his response.

Q: “[McGregor] had a hard time putting on his sneakers. Could he have been injured before the fight?”

DANA: “I have no idea. That I don’t know. I mean, the day of the press conference, he came running out of the back and ran right up to him and stopped abruptly and squared off with him. They were pushing foreheads.”

Q: “I just wondered if something happened in the last 24 hours. I don’t see it on the actual landing of that fight.”

DANA: “I wouldn’t know that but I didn’t see, you know, the doctors checked him out before the fight and he looked damned good at the press conference and he looked fine at the weigh-ins.”

Q: “The question of getting paid as you step in the cage.”

DANA: “Listen, if anybody saw anything that could have possibly made him look weak or injured leading up to this fight, I mean, what the fuck did the face off do, 44 million in 24 hours? More than 44 million views. Somebody would have saw something. Anybody see something? If they did, they didn’t say it. Which is impossible that nobody would do that.”

But how many of the fans who paid thousands of dollars for seats at UFC 329 are going to blame Ari Emanuel or Dana White? Maybe a handful. Maybe. All the heat will be on Conor McGregor. That works perfectly fine for UFC.

Put this old horse out of pasture. Just like the rest of them.

The end of legacy MMA fights as a marketing gimmick

The stench of Ronda Rousey smoking Gina Carano in 20 seconds with an armbar and Conor McGregor trashing his lower extremities in a minute will put an end to the 2026 love affair of washed-up legends fighting in MMA.

I thought we already were past this trend with Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz III promoted by Golden Boy in 2018. I guess not.

It’s a shame that the older legacy fighters have most of the star power, but that is the feature of Mark Shapiro’s value extraction system. UFC is the star. Who else would be able to generate a $26M gate for a Conor McGregor return?

Conor McGregor wanted to burn the last two fights on his UFC contract to perhaps find greener pastures on Netflix or another streamer. Maybe Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian could have squeezed out a mega-fight on Netflix. Not anymore. That is over.

Does Conor McGregor need the money? Who knows.

Conor McGregor spent UFC 329 fight week talking about how he drowned himself in alcohol because a bunch of inventory was in his garage. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him? As we recently discussed on The MMA Draw podcast, Conor McGregor’s fortunes seem intertwined with Floyd Mayweather’s failure to maintain his fortune. One would hope for Conor’s sake that he managed to keep his wealth, but who knows? Between a high-flying lifestyle, the Nikita Hand civil case, and other various business ventures, cash flow may be necessary. We just don’t know.

But now the biggest question is whether or not Conor McGregor can make it for one more fight. He is certainly going to try. Max Holloway was trying to placate a very angry and dejected crowd by hyping up a trilogy fight. Good luck selling that one.

Conor McGregor survived a catastrophic left leg injury and got two New York Times articles accusing him of steroid and HGH usage. He’s now suffered an embarrassing right leg injury that could permanently end his career. Is there a market left that wants to pay to watch Conor McGregor? Given the verdict in the Nikita Hand sexual assault trial, it’s highly unlikely that such an audience would be found in Europe.

Conor McGregor did receive a nice reaction from the Las Vegas crowd, but you would be hard-pressed to find many Irish fans in attendance. Mr. McGregor wrapped the flag of Ireland around himself all week long, including two gimmicked UFC title belts in his native country’s colors.

Paddy Pimblett, coming off of a brutal loss to Justin Gaethje, had a much stronger crowd reaction. Pimblett’s quick finish of Benoit St. Denis may have very well saved UFC 329 from being an average show to at least a show with a good talking point for future dream matches for Napoleon Blownapart’s favorite Scouser.

Bottom line? Between Conor’s UFC 329 debacle and a slimmed-down Gina Carano smiling after losing in 20 seconds, the modern MMA fan in 2026 has had just about enough of seeing the legends they happened to miss before their current MMA fandom started.

Bad fights can stink up the joint in combat sports, but anti-climactic finishes are real audience killers. UFC 329 was defined more by what was missing rather than what was present.

A night of missed opportunities

Zuffa Boxing just signed Shakur Stevenson, America’s best boxer, to a brand new contract. And, right on cue, the UFC production team screwed up Stevenson’s on-screen cameo. The wrong name and identifier. Spent maybe five seconds highlighting the greatest prize fighter that ZBXG has signed.

Whoever came up with ZBXG for marketing should be demoted or fired. Especially with those ridiculous Zuffa Boxing branded snuggies. And whoever is in charge of promoting the upcoming ZBXG event at The Felt Forum at MSG needs to get a fire under their ass because this is beyond lame and lackluster marketing for a show featuring Edgar Berlanga and Richardson Hitchins.

The long-rumored Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn fight was not announced at UFC 329. Despite these fighters appearing at UFC 329 weigh-ins, it appears that both Oscar De La Hoya (Golden Boy) and DAZN are raising potential contractual questions about Zuffa Boxing’s role in promoting this fight. Perhaps that is why Dana White was less than happy at times during UFC 329 fight week.

And then there was this cherry on top of the sloppy UFC production team work product:

There were a lot of missed opportunities at UFC 329.

Terrence McKinney absolutely should have submitted Bobby “King” Green. It was completely inexplicable that the much faster, quicker, and sharper striker lost that fight. Watching a much faster and sharper striker in Lone’er Kavanaugh lose to Brandon Royval was depressing. That was entirely a winnable fight on the ground. Robert Whittaker looked OK at Light Heavyweight, but Joe Rogan was doing his best “ooh, baby, you fat” impersonation. Whittaker had trouble with Nikita Krylov’s size at first, but Krylov displayed little defensive prowess and got his jaw smashed into oblivion.

Then there was Gable Stevenson. It was what it was. I’m still surprised he wasn’t on the main card.

As with the previous UFC on Paramount events in 2026, the pacing on the main card absolutely dragged. Ari Emanuel was everywhere on his headset. UFC is an advertising company disguised as a fight promotion.

They have lots of inventory to sell. I’m sure we will all be watching. The circus must continue. But not everyone will leave happy, especially after UFC 329. At some point, at some point, the cumulative value extraction has to add up. So far, it hasn’t.

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 with a pretty stacked card. Atop that card is Conor McGregor; the walking embodiment of the phrase some people are so poor that all they have is money. He’s fighting for the first time in five years. That’s if you don’t count the fighting he did to clear his name in court… for rape. He lost that fight, by the way.

The UFC is an increasingly safe space for guys like McGregor, though.

The UFC think they can squeeze some dollars out of him on Saturday. To do that they are trying to convince us that he’s still a good fighter, a star and someone who deserves our attention. I disagree with all this and the lack of interest over this fight is proving me right on a lot of that.

They’ve matched the notoriously scummy McGregor up with the effortlessly likeable Max Holloway.

This card also includes Benoit Saint Denis vs. Paddy Pimblett, Nikita Krylov vs. Robert Whittaker, Brandon Royval vs. Lone’er Kavanagh, Cory Sandhagen vs. Mario Bautista and King Green vs. Terrance McKinney. Those could all be great.

Oh and there’s Gable Steveson, too… Another guy who proves that the UFC, and their slap happy president, don’t care about what any of these fighters do to women.

I’m still leading our picks competition, despite a so-so record at UFC Baku. I kept rolling with my lock pick, though. Miguel is closing in on my, though!

Check out who we all picked this week:

Leader board

UFC 329 picks and predictions

Conor McGregor (+185) vs. Max Holloway (-225)

Miguel Class: I was shocked to hear that they were giving McGregor such a credible opponent after such a long hiatus from the sport, but I think that just means the UFC has no illusions about him getting anywhere near a UFC title at this point. McGregor will be turning 38 just a few days after this fight and it has been very clear that he hasn’t been a GSP type of athlete that maintains athletic discipline as he ages. I would be very hesitant to pick an aging fighter coming back after a five year layoff against any credible, active opponent. But coming back to fight Max Holloway? That’s an impossible task.

Nate has a new nom de blog to write about politics and a new Substack to go with it:

Nat Wilson Turner

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Yeah, yeah, I know the joke is a little too obvious, but I’m not talking about the dude we know as Conor McGregor, the one Andreas Hale so ably chronicled for ESPN, I’m just including a few of the lowlights; there are literally dozens more:

• Sept. 11, 2018: Michael Chiesa sues McGregor for an undisclosed amount following UFC 223 bus attack, citing “serious personal, economic and other injury” and “severe emotional distress, mental trauma and/or bodily harm” in court papers filed to Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn, New York.

• March 26, 2019: The New York Times reports that McGregor is under investigation for allegations of sexual assault at a Dublin hotel in December 2018. Shortly after the report, McGregor announced he was retiring from MMA. This is the second time he has “retired” from MMA on social media.

• Aug. 15, 2019: TMZ publishes an April video of McGregor punching 50-year-old Desmond Keogh at The Marble Arch Pub in Dublin.

• Sept. 10, 2020: McGregor is arrested on the French island of Corsica on suspicion of sexual assault and indecent exposure for an alleged incident at a bar. He is released without charge two days later.

• Jan. 24, 2023: An Irish woman alleges in July 2022 that McGregor assaulted her on his yacht in Ibiza, Spain. She alleges McGregor punched her and threatened to drown her at a party in July on his boat during a birthday party for McGregor. The woman also alleges that she jumped off the yacht to get away from McGregor, breaking her arm in the process. McGregor denies the allegations through his attorney. Days before the claim, the woman’s car was set on fire by unknown assailants.

• June 9, 2023: McGregor is involved in a skit at halftime of Game 4 of the NBA Finals where he’s to punch Miami Heat mascot Burnie. McGregor takes things too far after punching the mascot when he delivers a second blow to the fallen Burnie. The man inside the costume is taken to the emergency room for injuries sustained in the incident.

• June 11, 2023: McGregor was accused of sexually assaulting a woman inside the VIP restroom at the Kaseya Center at Game 4 of the NBA Finals in Miami. The woman claims McGregor “aggressively kissed her” before attempting to force her into multiple sexual acts. McGregor denies the allegation through his attorney.

• Nov. 22, 2024: McGregor is found guilty in a civil suit stemming from an accusation that the fighter sexually assaulted a woman in a hotel room back in December 2018. McGregor was ordered by the High Court in Dublin to pay 248,000 euros ($257,000) to his accuser. The Irishman denied the accusations and stated that he had consensual sex with his accuser. He is not currently facing any criminal charges from the incident.

• July 31, 2025: McGregor loses his attempt to appeal the Irish High Court's decision to find him liable of sexual assault in November 2024.

No, not that stupid asshole. I’m done with that guy.

Ireland has had enough

According to Petesy Carroll, so is Ireland:

There are people in Ireland who can’t fathom the idea of McGregor the athlete, or the biggest superstar the UFC has ever created, taking precedence over his lengthy rap sheet. On the other hand, there is a whole new UFC fanbase that is champing at the bit for its first fight week experience starring “The Notorious,” and a mere mention of Nikita Hand or 2024’s civil sexual assault trial can provoke the most vehement defenses.

This, of course, is the reality of covering the most divisive and controversial athlete to ever hail from the Emerald Isle.

…

McGregor was once an overwhelmingly positive story back home. As his peers were in the midst of a nation-wide recession, he forged a path in a sport most Irish people had never heard of and eventually went on to transcend it. Winning the 2016 RTE Sports Personality of the Year, as voted by the public, is evidence of how prominent he was in the broader Irish consciousness, despite thriving in a niche discipline.

It was somewhere around his blockbuster boxing bout with Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2017 when the tone began to shift in Ireland. While he was still hugely popular, people began to take issue not only with the "circus" fight with Mayweather, but also some of McGregor's declarations, a memorable one being him telling the people of New York that he was "Black from the waist down" at a pre-fight press conference.

…

The conveyor belt of negativity culminated with McGregor being found liable in an Irish civil court for the sexual assault of Nikita Hand in November 2024.

It was the biggest story in the country that year, and the public perception of McGregor was damaged to an unprecedented level. People marched through the streets demanding that a criminal case be reopened in the aftermath. Massive retailers boycotted McGregor-related products.

For the majority of people back home, it wasn’t just the straw that broke the camel’s back; it was the final nail in the coffin.

I’m with the Irish on this one. I’ve had plenty of Conor McGregor the human being living in 2026, a lifetime supply in fact.

Conor coulda woulda shoulda GOATed

But Conor McGregor the fighter who first took the UFC by storm and then transcended the sport from 2013 to 2016, him I still care about.

McGregor at his best was on the road to being the GOAT of GOATs, the best there’s ever been.

Unfortunately, Endeavor bought a controlling interest in the UFC in 2016, and they didn’t want to blow up their pay scale — the one they’ve already paid $375 million in court for, the one that limits fighters’ share of revenue to 15% no matter what.

Petesy and the Irish public he’s speaking for are absolutely right to identify the 2017 Mayweather boxing bout as the moment Conor McGregor jumped the shark.

But what Petesy is missing is that it was not only the moment when McGregor went rancid, it’s also the point at which Endeavor threw away all the work that Zuffa had done to establish MMA as THE combat sport.

By letting McGregor face Mayweather in a boxing ring — at a point in time when the average idiot in the US knew that MMA > boxing and that the heavyweight champ of the UFC would absolutely murder the best boxer in the world 9/10 times in a street fight — Endeavor chose to protect their profit margins and severely damange the sport and stunt the man who was on track to be the best to ever do it.

Indulge me some fight fan nostalgia.

Conor McGregor’s great run

When McGregor made his UFC debut in April 2013, he was a 24-year-old with a 12-2 record in Irish MMA — a complete backwater of the sport of the time.

But then you could say that in 1964, John Lennon was a 24-year-old with 4 #1 hits in England — a completely irrelevant musical backwater — when he walked on Ed Sullivan’s stage in February 1964, too.

McGregor wasted no time in making his presence felt by TKO’ing an up-and-coming Marcus Brimage in a little over one minute in his UFC debut.

But it was his second fight with an admittedly green Max Holloway that first showed UFC fans we were seeing someone special.

That fight is at the top of this post. McGregor’s karate-based style completely flummoxed Holloway — a gifted fighter coming from a more conventional Muay Thai background — in the first round and dominated him in the second and third.

It was only when we learned that Conor had blown out his ACL in that first round that we realized, “Holy shit, this kid has got the stuff.”

Fans had to wait over a year for McGregor to return from surgery and rehab, but over the next year he would fight four times and reeled off four highlight reel wins over the cream of the featherweight division at the time and he made it look easy: Diego Brandao TKO 4:05 of the 1st; Dustin Poirier TKO at 1:46 of the 1st; Denis Siver TKO 1:54 of the 2nd; Chad Mendes TKO 4:57 of the 2nd.

The Siver fight was McGregor’s first time headlining a UFC card — a Fight Night that aired on Fox Sports 1, so it wasn’t quite the big time, yet — but it was a star-making performance.

Watch the video above; the aura just drips off the guy. Rizz for miles, and he backed up the style with the skill, precision, and power to completely overawe the veteran Siver.

By the time he beat Chad Mendes (who was stepping in for an injured Jose Aldo) at UFC 189, McGregor was not only proving he could beat one of the best wrestlers in the division, he was drawing a $7 million gate and selling a reported 825,000 pay-per-views.

And when he finally got the legendary Jose Aldo in the Octagon at UFC 194 in December 2015, he put on the performance that sealed his legend: destroying the champ, who’d been baited into foolishly charging at the impudent Irishman, with one beautiful, perfectly targeted left hand that ended the fight by KO at 0:13.

The Nate Diaz diversion only burnished Conor’s rep

UFC 196 was originally planned to be the capstone of the promotion’s still unmatched mid-2010’s run in Brazil.

In partnership with the country’s top TV network, Globo, the UFC was setting viewership records that remain the all-time popular pinnacle of MMA on Planet Earth thanks to Brazilian champs Anderson Silva, Fabricio Werdum, Jose Aldo, Raphael dos Anjos and Junior dos Santos.

The original plan was for UFC 196 to feature a heavyweight title fight between Werdum vs Cain Velasquez AND a middleweight title fight pitting Anderson Silva vs Michael Bisping in one of Brazil’s largest venues, the 42,000-capacity Arena da Baixada.

But alas, that all fell apart, and even moving the event to a 15,000-seater in Rio still left the promotion in dire need of a headliner, preferably Brazilian.

The initial plan was for dos Anjos to defend his lightweight title against featherweight champ McGregor — who was already a massive heel in Brazil after flatlining Aldo — and I’ll let Wikipedia tell the sad story of how featherweight Conor found himself in the cage fighting at welterweight against then-journeyman Nate Diaz:

On February 23, the planned bout suffered a setback as it was announced that dos Anjos pulled out due to a broken foot. Former UFC Featherweight Champion José Aldo declined the initial opportunity to replace him due to "lack of time" to prepare for the bout. Former lightweight champion and top featherweight contender Frankie Edgar also declined the opportunity due to a groin injury.

Eventually, The Ultimate Fighter 5 winner and former lightweight title challenger Nate Diaz was announced as the replacement and the bout took place in the welterweight division.

Sure, I was among the many haters cheering wildly when Diaz survived McGregor’s initial attacks to win by submission after hurting Conor on the feet late in the second round.

But in retrospect, there was no shame in McGregor taking one for the promotion or in the featherweight champ moving up and losing to a welterweight.

And all was redeemed when Conor dominated Diaz en route to a decision win at UFC 202 — a card that sold 1.6 million PPVs

And that set up McGregor’s last moment of MMA greatness, utterly destroying the lightweight champ Eddie Alvarez in a terrifyingly one-sided bout.

Give it another watch:

McGregor, despite moving up in class, seemed the bigger man in every sense of the word. His left hand dropped Alvarez on first contact and kept dropping him again and again until the finish was secured late in the second round.

The aura around Conor McGregor — the first simultaneous two-division champ in UFC history — at that point was at Michael Jackson Thriller levels.

Sadly, Endeavor did what they did in 2017, and McGregor did what he did from 2017 on, and here we are.

Endeavor’s greed and the kind of rot that happens inside a man when he’s paid $100 million for a bout he never earned in a sport in which he’d never competed combined to ruin the legacy McGregor spent his first 29 years building.

It’s not just that he was overpaid; more importantly, he — and the fans — were robbed of the chance to see peak McGregor against the greatest lightweights division in UFC history — not just Khabib Nurmagomedov (who fought a post-Mayweather, much diminished McGregor instead of the magic man who destroyed Eddie Alvarez), but also Justin Gaethje, Charles Oliveira, Tony Ferguson, Kevin Lee, Edson Barboza and maybe even Michael Chandler had McGregor continued his run until 2020.

Just imagine what might have been!

His fight career since 2017, like his personal conduct, has just been an endless series of shameful episodes and richly deserved defeats, so I’ll leave that to someone else to chronicle.

But let’s pour one out for the near greatness that Conor McGregor achieved and the greatness that might have been had the Fertitta Brothers not sold out the sport to Hollywood hustlers for $4 billion.

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

Everyone is holding their breath to see if Conor McGregor will, in fact, make his long-awaited return to the Octagon to fight Max Holloway at UFC 329 this weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada at T-Mobile Arena.

In 2026, the two biggest stars in boxing & MMA remain Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor. Both men’s legacies are strangely connected to each other when it comes to business and legal issues.

Ari Emanuel’s decision to take the money from their 2017 boxing match instead of changing UFC fighter pay calculations is what has led us down this rather crazy world of fight sport economics. It’s why there is still ongoing UFC antitrust litigation.

This week’s edition of The MMA Draw Podcast is one of our best shows to update. If you have not already subscribed, sign up and give us a try for a month for $8. For our current subscribers or those of you considering a paid subscription, $69 a year is the best bargain for the kind of combat sports news and information we provide. There’s a reason industry leaders are all-in on following our content.

This week’s podcast menu of topics for our listeners includes:

• The future of Conor McGregor and how his legacy inevitably is tied to Floyd Mayweather’s misfortunes. Will Conor be able to emerge from a better financial and legal position than Floyd is currently in?

• Why Ari Emanuel’s decision to allow Conor McGregor to box Floyd Mayweather permanently changed the trajectory of both boxing and UFC for better and for worse.

• What realistic expectations fans should have for Conor McGregor vs. Max Holloway at UFC 329, including our estimates on how big the T-Mobile Arena gate will likely be.

• A blockbuster development in UFC antitrust evidence spoliation hearings regarding Dana White’s iPhone 11 Pro phone potentially getting erased. Who did what and when? We separate fact from fiction in regards to what it means for ongoing UFC litigation as far as a timetable and likely outcome, either in settlement or if the case goes to trial. Paid subscribers have access to Zach’s full article on what happened in the courtroom last week.

• The growing role of Big Law firm Latham & Watkins in the UFC antitrust lawsuit with long-time UFC attorney Colby Williams leaving to join his old bosses at Red Rock Casino.

• How Latham & Watkins became Ari Emanuel’s most trusted legal advisors. How does Ari view his Big Law partners in regards to their role in US Government affairs? Nate & Zach play newly released audio by a Delaware court (obtained by Brandon Thurston of POST Wrestling + Wrestlenomics) regarding Ari Emanuel & Vince McMahon voice messages communicating behind-the-scenes chicanery to sell WWE to Endeavor. Did Janel Grant help Ari Emanuel become a billionaire?

• What the future of UFC & WWE could look like once current US President Donald Trump is out of office.

If you like your fight news hot, intense, and in-depth, The MMA Draw is the place to sign up and become a full-time subscriber.

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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. Contact Zach: fightopinion at protonmail dot com.

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2026 was proving to be a hell of a year for the plaintiffs in the UFC antitrust litigation against TKO (and Endeavor).

Hunter Campbell and Dana White played musical chairs about who knew what and when and who does what and when.

Recently, several UFC fighter managers filed Federal court declarations claiming that Hunter Campbell is in the man running the show and that they didn’t negotiate key business matters with Dana White.

UFC matchmakers Sean Shelby & Mick Maynard were probed and prodded about the scope of Dana White’s involvement in UFC fighter negotiations in the Endeavor era over the last 10 years. Both men’s testimony likely helped the plaintiffs on their road to obtaining class certification.

And then… everything went to hell in a handbasket.

In an attempt to avoid dueling experts over deleted digital discovery disputes involving texts and e-mails and phone records, Las Vegas Federal Judge Richard Boulware appointed his own independent court expert.

The reasoning behind Judge Boulware’s appointment? Have an independent arbiter look at various phone images and compile a report. The idea of hiring a court expert is not some brand new concept. Many experts on many subject matters can make a lucrative salary testifying in Federal court cases.

Which brings us to Eric Wedin of Kroll.

Eric leverages more than ten years of digital forensics and incident response experience in complex cybersecurity investigations, including incident response involving email compromise and wire transfer fraud, corporate espionage, insider threats, ransomware and data exfiltration. He has provided over 1,000 hours of testimony at depositions, hearings and courtroom trials. Eric is a peer coach for the International Association of Computer Investigative Specialists.

This individual claims to have previously worked for the US Secret Service. Mr. Wedin’s profile seems to be a perfect fit for the job Judge Boulware needed done.

What would this independent expert determine regarding months, if not years, worth of deleted ESI in the world of UFC? Would there be a smoking gun? Would Mr. Wedin discover a secret that would blow this UFC antitrust case wide open and provide hard proof that spoliation of evidence occurred?

The kind of evidence destruction that would enable Judge Boulware to implement level two Rule 37(e) sanctions against UFC that would create burden shifting should the case(s) go to trial?

Well, last Wednesday we all got an answer — and it was one that nobody was prepared for.

Dana White’s missing iPhone 11 Pro

Remember when Hunter Campbell testified last February that one of the missing UFC phones not turned over to the plaintiffs may have been stolen by a mystery relative of Ari Emanuel?

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Did you know there was a Peace Summit for boxing? I don’t know for sure who called it, but is seems Turki Alalshikh, the self-styled Prince of Pugilism, wanted to settle some family business.

To recap what happened in London last week at the de facto summit of major international boxing promoters, including Turki Alalshikh of Riyadh Season, Nick Khan of TKO/Zuffa Boxing, and Eddie Hearn of Matchroom:

• Turki Alalshikh wanted all the major boxing promoters to meet him in London for a short-notice summit. I guess all the family in-fighting isn’t so much fun now that it’s gotten very personal.

• The backdrop: Dana White and Eddie Hearn have been having a war of words for the last three months. Eddie Hearn has signed Tom Aspinall and Ian Garry to commercial deals and shit-talked the UFC’s pay scale. Dana White says Eddie doesn’t know what he’s talking about (although it may be that Dana doesn’t know what he’s talking about), especially when it comes to promoting Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua. We don’t even know when that fight will happen or where.

• The Saudis and UAE lost a lot of money in the US/Israel vs. Iranian conflict

• Turki managed to keep his power thanks to the collapse of his Kingdom sports investment rival Yasir Al-Rumayyan and the Public Investment Fund cutting back on its sporting investments, including LIV Golf. Most US media analysts misread it at the time, but MMA Draw readers were not surprised at the outcome.

• Eddie Hearn and Matchroom were working on Saudi financing for MB and darts, including Mr. Hearn spending Christmas at the Monster Inoue fight in Riyadh to negotiate. Instead, the Saudis pulled back on darts financing and Bruin Capital stepped in and put in 15% of capital for a seat at the table.

• Turki’s boxing events continue to lose money and interest (see Times Square debacle with Ed Pereira, Tyson Fury in Tottenham, Rico Verhoeven vs. Oleksandr Usyk at the Pyramids). Canelo’s fight with Christian Mbilli just got pushed back another month, likely because of Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn in September. The Benn experiment is a financial disaster and an overpay for Zuffa Boxing. Turki helped Zuffa Boxing poach Benn away from Eddie Hearn only for it to backfire.

• Zuffa Boxing is getting paid a reported $100M a year by Paramount for an atrocious product nobody watches as a JV with SELA but is entirely positioned to take over boxing through pure process and money (see: Dan Canobbio’s recent comments to Ariel Helwani). The one financially successful fight for Turki’s Riyadh Season was the one that TKO helped him promote: Terence Crawford vs. Canelo Alvarez.

Turki posted a very strange comment about losing his memory and health issues, teasing a promotional meeting with the world powers in boxing. (NY Times reported about his decade-long cancer/tumor issues.)

“I’ll do my best to do a meeting soon between my brothers Dana White, Nick Khan, Frank Warren, Eddie Hearn, and my partners and friends. To make peace and revolution for boxing. I hope I succeed and boxing fans see the white smoke rise from the chimney.

“I want to do it before losing my memory. I’m afraid in 2028 or 2029 I’ll forget my name.”

So, what did we get at Turki’s summit?

• Turki met with the major players in London plus Nick Khan, but not Dana White.

• Turki and Nick Khan posed for their own photo separate from the photo of the rest of the promoters at the kids’ table.

• Turki bragged about “owning” 60% of Zuffa Boxing (which is interesting, because the original press release said that the Saudi-owned company SELA was TKO’s partner in Zuffa Boxing) while also running Ring events. Remember, Turki is playing with Saudi money, not his own.

• Turki tried to re-establish himself as the center of the boxing universe and peacemaker, trying to calm promotional wars that were largely triggered by his own actions.

• Turki attacked boxing writer Darshan Desai for mild criticism, calling him an Ariel Helwani stooge.

• Most observers were left totally confused as to the point of the meeting.

The guy whose head has to be spinning the most is Stephen Espinoza, former Showtime boxing boss who helped produce mega-fights all the way up through 2023.

Three years ago, Espinoza was busy promoting three separate $20M Las Vegas boxing gates.

Dana White’s response? Shitting all over Espinoza as a loser and grifter.

“That’s exactly the type of response I would expect from that weasel Espinoza,” White wrote on Instagram. “That scumbag has absolutely nothing to do with the success of Canelo [Alvarez], Ryan Garcia and Terence Crawford. Those guys are mega stars and they are the ones responsible for driving the gates in their fights. For him to even try and take any credit at all shows you what an arrogant, delusional [piece of s*** ] that guy is.”

Showtime was believed to be losing money on boxing, so they dumped Espinoza and got out of the sport.

Turki Alalshikh filled the void.

Three years later, can anyone truly argue boxing is in a better place under Turki than it was under Stephen Espinoza? Perhaps internationally, yes, but certainly not in the United States.

For his troubles, Espinoza was named as a defendant in a $340M lawsuit by Floyd Mayweather in Los Angeles for allegedly being part of a scheme to divert Floyd’s prize money. The case was removed from state to Federal court by Showtime, a dead brand (owned by David Ellison’s Paramount) which nonetheless still has to legally defend itself from Mayweather’s legal claims.

Even crazier, Espinoza recently filed a Federal court declaration in support of Mayweather after he got sued by CSI Sports over allegations that he took an advance for a Mike Tyson fight only to renege on contractual obligations.

Comparing the Espinoza vs. Turki eras

The HBO Boxing brand is dead. Showtime is dead. Is the boxing business in better shape under Turki’s Ring/Zuffa hybrid promotional front?

DAZN has now siloed every non-Zuffa boxing promoter into their corner and is airing events on TNT in the States on the 4th of July.

According to The Financial Times, financier Len Blavatnik just domiciled DAZN in the Cayman Islands, likely to seek more financing or perhaps an IPO.

What happens if DAZN collapses and there’s no more money flowing in? The whole boxing universe collapses.

We’re already seeing signs of strain in boxing media, with Boxing Scene laying off staff, plus Paul Magno’s inspiring change of heart, and the public claims of financial troubles at Boxing Social.

If all of this smells like the musty old scent of congestive failure that plagued MMA media, you’re not alone.

Under Turki’s ownership, The Ring now completely dominates boxing media. It was Turki’s smartest investment and Oscar De La Hoya’s dumbest move to date. He brought in Rick Reeno (who formerly owned Boxing Scene, then sold it to Showtime) and Mike Coppinger (from ESPN). Turki drives the boxing news cycle on Ring. All that’s left for semi-independent media are outlets like Uncrowned or IFL TV.

As Paul Magno recently wrote at The Boxing Tribune:

This whole setup—Fury-Wach, Joshua-Prenga—is a pile of fetid dog shit staining the boxing schedule, even if it does end up being a prelude to Fury-Joshua, which is about one-eighth as interesting as it would’ve been seven or eight years ago.

Unless the Saudis paying to make these fights might also want to pay me.

This is where the new me steps in.
…
I’m learning. Pay me enough and I’ll say anything in any way, and I’ll always end up deferring to whatever my boss’ agenda is. Hell, I don’t even need a big hunk of cheddar. Just pay me. Period. Just a taste. And give me an occasional press pass so I can park my swamp ass between the sissy with the journalism degree and the nerd compiling punch stats, discussing stylistic matchups and where Dan Rafael got those scrumptious-looking chocolate chip cookies.

I don’t want to keep being this loser, like Mr. Ring Magazine Senior Writer pointed out, walking around saying shit like it doesn’t matter whose toes I step on, being so cocky as to think that being a writer gives me a pass to say anything I feel to be true. What a coward I’ve been! I want to be part of the brotherhood of boxing media, fearful of pissing off the wrong person and self-censoring like a motherfucker.

I know I can do it.

The idea was supposed to revolve around the concept of Turki as a benevolent dictator in boxing and that everyone would comfortably follow his lead until they were no longer useful.

Then the TKO/Zuffa Boxing heavyweights would take over boxing in a fait accompli. It’s only dawning on the incumbent powers-that-be in boxing that this was the game plan all along.

On the MMA side of the world, those who have been destroyed by the Zuffa meat grinder can only laugh in despair at how naive their boxing counterparts have been.

Turki is attempting to re-establish the narrative that he personally runs boxing. He’s attempting to stop the in-fighting between the key boxing promoters.

At the same time, he’s establishing that he — and Nick Khan — are in charge. Yet, very few fans give a damn or care to watch Zuffa Boxing.

Which is why Dan Canobbio’s comments about Zuffa Boxing being a long-term winner are right but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Zuffa’s entire goal is to own the shrinking pie that is boxing, monopolize it, then control the pay structure as they have with UFC and now WWE. I hope boxers enjoy fighting for 15% of revenue.

The yin-and-the-yang strategy. For the biggest fights, Turki finances those in his own Saudi silo while Zuffa cleans up on the minor or mid-major events.

The problem for Turki is how much time, medically or financially or politically, does he have left?

The problem for Nick Khan is that Zuffa Boxing is the absolute shits. It has a very small audience, and the production/scripting format is an abomination. Max Kellerman is a disgrace.

Joe Tessitore is reading narratives and scripts as if Vince McMahon is barking in his ear. “Beltholders” and “fighters come back stronger after a loss” and artificial screaming when a fighter gets knocked down. Everything feels entirely forced and corporate, which was never truly the spirit of boxing.

The marketplace is telling us that there are fans who are curious about what Turki is up to but not enough to pay to watch the fights he puts on. Zuffa Boxing is getting a free ride because it’s entirely subsidized due to politics involving the Ellisons and Ari Emanuel.

Where’s the beef? The Turki/Zuffa Boxing tag team is all about choking the life out of boxing through process. The Berlin Wall of Boxing has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

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

It’s exactly the kind of headline that would normally fly under the radar, but the ramifications are too big to ignore.

J. Colby Williams, attorney for the UFC since the Zuffa era, will no longer represent the company as of September. The veteran trial attorney will become both the Executive Vice President and General Counsel for Red Rock Casinos.

The UFC was a major client of the Las Vegas law firm Campbell & Williams.

Current UFC EVP & CBO Hunter Campbell is the son of Don Campbell, Colby Williams’ long-time law partner.

Campbell & Williams has represented and currently represents significant clients in Nevada-based legislation, including Dana White and TikTok. This recent 2025 Eighth Judicial Court video demonstrates the silky smooth Colby Williams in action:

Colby Williams is one of the most trusted individuals in the orbit of Frank & Lorenzo Fertitta. You don’t have to take my word for it.

“On behalf of the entire organization, I want to thank Jeff for his leadership and contributions that have positioned us for continued success, and to wish him the best in his well-deserved retirement,” said Frank Fertitta III, Chief Executive Officer of the Company. “We are looking forward to welcoming Colby, a longtime and trusted advisor to the Company and to me. His successful and impressive legal track record and his intimate familiarity with our organization will ensure a seamless transition.”

Mr. Williams is expected to join the organization on or around Sept. 8, 2026 and will oversee and execute the Company’s legal, regulatory and compliance matters. Mr. Williams is a founding partner of the litigation boutique Campbell & Williams. Over his thirty-plus year career, he has handled numerous precedent setting cases in the fields of complex commercial litigation, high stakes administrative proceedings, catastrophic personal injury, and First Amendment Law. In that role, Mr. Williams has worked closely with the Company’s executive team and legal department for two decades. In addition to many other awards and accolades Mr. Williams has held an AV “Preeminent” ranking for two decades, which is the highest rating for legal skill and ethical practices designated by Martindale-Hubbell. In March 2025, Mr. Williams was inducted into the prestigious American College of Trial Lawyers, an honor reserved for the top 1% of trial attorneys in the country.

This is a big deal.

For our little corner of the fight world, Colby Williams leaving the UFC antitrust case is by far the biggest legal bombshell to date.

Simply put, Colby Williams is the best trial attorney UFC had access to. For him to leave the case should signal a red flag.

There are a few reasons why this development is important to track.

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