There's no joy in UFC's Saudi Sphere of influence

Why are Dana White & Turki Alalshikh so cranky these days?

September was supposed to be a big month of celebration for Endeavor with UFC 306. Instead, the company is now fighting to maintain big show relevance in Las Vegas as they make their debut at The Sphere.

Yes, the home of the rapidly expanding APEX is dealing with a goofy turf war over the hearts and minds of locals.

The Riyadh Season-sponsored event on 9/11 Week that somehow is supposed to celebrate Mexican Independence Day is now finding itself in a situation where it may end up being The B Show to a Canelo Alvarez fight at T-Mobile Arena.

Forget what the quasi-private equity bean counters at Endeavor are thinking. Barring a dramatic shift in momentum, the UFC’s experiment at The Sphere is turning into an embarrassing loss of face for Dana White.

And his business partner for the event, Turki Alalshikh, is starting to act like a poor man’s version of Tony Khan. How is that possible?

Losing face vs. Losing money

At this point in the festivities, we know why Ari Emanuel and company had to make a deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to help finance the UFC’s money pit misadventure at The Sphere.

Dana White wanted his own Crown Jewel event: The event of all events; The highest-grossing event in UFC history; An event bigger than all the PRIDE mega shows at Saitama Super Arena; An event even bigger than K-1 in 2002 at the National Stadium in Tokyo.

When the dust settles, UFC accountants will argue to the public with a straight face that they managed to make more money than Scrooge McDuck. What won’t be explained is how they did it and what resources they had to burn to do it.

Endeavor is hooked on cheap and easy money, monstrous free cash flow, and taxpayer welfare.

You pay them, they don’t pay you.

The Sphere has turned out to be the complete antithesis of what the value extractors stand for.

Dana White got in over his head with production expenses at The Sphere. The hole got so deep, they cut a deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for sponsorship. On the week of 9/11 no less.

The UFC office arrogantly felt they could run against a Canelo Alvarez fight and be The A Show on Mexican Independence Day.

They own Las Vegas.

Not so much in 2024. UFC at The Sphere is increasingly appearing to be The B Show in Vegas on September 14th.

Should this trend hold, it will be a huge loss of face for Dana White. It will also be a loss of face for the UFC office, which has burned many loyal Vegas customers with exorbitant ticket prices. Over-charging and under-delivering. No Conor. No bueno.

It’s a shocking turn of events for UFC. Ever since their proposed $335 million dollar antitrust settlement several months ago, UFC has been burning through political capital and good will in the desert.

It’s an unthinkable scenario and one that the plaintiffs in the antitrust case could have only dreamed of. A softening jury pool heading into Super Bowl 2025 weekend for trial. And all of this is UFC’s own damn fault.

The UFC will look everyone straight in the eye and say The Sphere event is a massive success. They’ll throw all the eye candy and stats in front of your face to make their case. But the fan sentiment doesn’t lie.

How many fans are talking about The Sphere fight card? The majority of discussion about this event is entirely about process instead of substance. Intriguingly, this is the framing that UFC chose in order to promote the show.

The Sphere was supposed to sell itself. The UFC brand was supposed to sell itself. All of the externalities outside of the fight card were going to sell the show.

Instead, UFC is burning resources to get as many people committed to going to The Sphere. It’ll look great on television but at what cost for the UFC office?

Real vs. fake ticket sales?

The most fascinating inside baseball storyline happening with UFC’s Sphere event is the ticket resale market.

Twitter provocateurs Fred Garvin and Trent Reinsmith have been making some waves with their various news updates about what the ticket market looks like for UFC at The Sphere.

Mr. Garvin noticed something very curious — a similar pattern of ticket resales for The Sphere as he witnessed for the August 2024 BMO Stadium event in Southern California with Terence Crawford. That event was promoted by Turki Alalshikh.

The BMO boxing event was supposed to be a grand boxing summit in which the Kingdom would gather all the major boxing players into one area to discuss a unified vision in which the Kingdom would take the lead with the alliance of various sanctioning bodies.

Instead, the BMO Stadium event has largely been an afterthought — with one exception that is coming into play for the September 14th weekend.

Here’s a couple screen grabs from Mr. Garvin’s Twitter account highlighting some rather peculiar discrepancies:

Fred Garvin: “Either they are delisting for repricing or we are now in full Turki mode for #UFC306 as several sections disappeared off primary while previously "sold" $757 tickets reappeared.”

Fred Garvin: The #UFC306 experience is currently going full Turki as the resale tickets keep disappearing in the same fashion as they did for the Bud card as prices get adjusted. PS - Might be a good time to sign up to a seat filling service if you live in Vegas.

Whether Mr. Garvin is 100% accurate or not, what is very clear is that momentum for UFC Sphere ticket sales has stalled. If business was as robust as UFC expected, you better believe that Endeavor’s friends at Sports Business Journal would have been leaking all of the good news. It’s been strangely quiet from our wannabe Wall Street Journal friends in the press.

You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to read the temperature of the room when it comes to how Dana White & Turki Alalshikh are feeling right now. They’re stressed. They’re acting like… *gasps*… actual fight promoters that have to hustle to make a buck. Their open frustration has recently led to some rather interesting public commentary.

Winning enemies and losing allies

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Dana White showing signs of wanting to have a public blow-up. He still barks occasionally on this or that but with his diminished power in an Ari Emanuel-owned UFC landscape, Dana is largely resorting to yelling at kids on social media with fight card promos.

It’s also been a long time since UFC has faced a challenge from competition and from their own incompetence.

You can talk about how lousy UFC’s matchmaking is — and you would be right. What you normally can’t say about the current vulture capitalists at Endeavor is that they’re bad businessmen, because they’re not.

Which is why Dana White is under heavy pressure over how much cash UFC has burned through to produce The Sphere event with an unappealing fight card.

UFC 306 squeezes all of the UFC’s current weaknesses into one curated package.

Which means someone has to be a foil for Dana White. It’s always someone else’s fault. The problem is who can Dana blame?

He can’t blame “greedy” agents because the UFC monopoly has pushed any managerial independence aside.

It’s not the fighters because UFC keeps the % of revenue paid out to talent at a tiny percentage.

It’s not the matchmakers because Dana making any sort of comment about how terrible the fight card is would be an admission against interests.

This means Dana White has to find one big bad enemy to blame — MGM.

Long story short — Dana blames MGM for giving Al Haymon an arena booking at T-Mobile for Canelo Alvarez. MGM didn’t apparently notify him. Dana claims MGM allowed him to book The Sphere as a make-up call.

Dana reveals that he’s had a long beef with the man behind MGM’s arena management who, for mysterious reasons, Dana will not name. But he will name Bill Hornbuckle, the man in charge of MGM, who Dana claims is trying to “fix” the situation long-term.

Adding intrigue to the drama is that UFC’s COO, Ike Epstein, is on the Stadium Authority board for Allegiant Stadium — the home of the Raiders. Is UFC prepared to utilize the threat of relocating to Allegiant as a way to retaliate against MGM?

All of this makes for intriguing inside ball for the 1% of 1% of fight fans who follow daily combat politics. For everyone else, who cares?

What is fascinating is Dana White’s continuing refusal to attack Al Haymon.

If this was any other promoter, Mr. White would have been shouting non-stop expletives about what a dirty rotten bastard Mr. Haymon is for stealing a T-Mobile booking away from him. Instead, Dana is acting as if there is honor among thieves — proverbially speaking, of course.

The unspoken question is why MGM supposedly chose to prioritize Al Haymon getting a booking slot at T-Mobile over UFC, the hometown corporate giant.

Perhaps the reason the question isn’t spoken out loud is because the answer would make the UFC look very bad?

If the frustration is mounting for Dana White and the UFC office, it’s also mounting for Turki Alalshikh and his plans to conquer combat sports throughout the world.

The BMO Stadium event in August was supposed to be his boxing version of the Treaty of Versailles. The Kingdom was going to end all the major wars among the top boxing promoters, with Turki guiding the helm for a new unified front. Except he didn’t close the deal with one particular individual — Canelo Alvarez.

That would prove to be a mistake.

Turki promised to eat Canelo Alvarez’s lunch on September 14th. After all, the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame went to BMO Stadium to present Turki an award!

Instead, Turki finds himself in a boxing quagmire of his own making. The UFC show he is sponsoring on September 14th in Las Vegas is looking more and more like The B Show while the Canelo Alvarez vs. Edgar Berlanga fight is gaining steam as The A Show.

I guess money can’t always buy you love.

With tensions mounting, Turki Alalshikh decided to channel his inner Tony Khan and start fights on Twitter. Of course he did. The advantage Turki has is that he’s connected to Mohammad bin Salman. Are you going to mess with that man?

Turki never expected to garner any push back, especially from the commoners in combat sports. Leave it to Jake Donovan, veteran scribe of Boxing Scene fame, to deliver a message to Turki that a lot of people have wanted to say but didn’t have the courage or timing to pull off:

Jake’s F You message to Turki was like watching a steam valve relieving pressure. A couple of days later, a rapprochement between the two sides appeared to be established — but the message was already delivered.

The cloak of invincibility that an Endeavor-backed Dana White and Kingdom-backed Turki Alalshikh possessed faded fast.

Both parties will continue to flaunt their cash publicly. Turki will move on to his next adventure at Wembley Stadium in late September. It will be fun to continue to see him trying to buy diplomacy through music — this time with Oasis — just like he tried with Eminem at BMO Stadium.

However, a sniff of weakness in combat sports can mean further instability. Dana White knows that lesson all too well. He and Endeavor ownership snuffed out the competition. Now the UFC office is burning through resources to keep up the mirage of strength and influence in Las Vegas. They can’t afford to lose any more support before the Federal antitrust trial is scheduled for Super Bowl week in 2025.

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