UFC 322 at MSG: Wall Street’s programmed customers

New York state of mind: Over 20,000 fans and $13.6M at the gate... for this?

The robots are being value extracted. Hard.

Watching the crowd’s reactions at UFC 322 in Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, the perfect sports and business analogy finally hit me. It was always on the tip of my tongue.

WME Group, owners of the UFC, is running its shop like the current ownership is running the New York Yankees.

Mark Shapiro is Hal Steinbrenner. Hunter Campbell is Brian Cashman. Dana White is Aaron Boone.

It makes sense, given that they’re all in business together with Gerry Cardinale of Redbird Capital.

UFC 322 at Madison Square Garden was the perfect encapsulation of the Private Equity Era of fight sport financing. Plenty of important VIPs paying thousands of dollars for floor seats. The era of paying Ari for Access has a direct impact on the type of fan willing to show up for a big UFC event.

Sure, there are still plenty of fans — like you and me — who have to run up massive credit card or loan debt just to buy tickets to go see this circus. But the business clients that matter to UFC, as we head into the 2026 Paramount campaign, are those who run or who want to run the world.

The influencers and movers who often frequent Dubai. Manifest-it moguls who have no problem playing TKO’s game of spending big bucks, chalking it up as the cost of doing business for being introduced to others with access to big capital, and then conducting real business deals afterwards.

Welcome to this brave new world of UFC.

The current type of MSG fan for UFC events is a far cry from the type of fan that attended Conor McGregor against Eddie Alvarez in 2016. It’s like comparing old school George Steinbrenner-era Bronx Stadium Yankee fans to today’s “look at me” luxury suite seat getters.

These current MSG fans are pretty well-behaved and know their programming role in this Hollywood screenplay. When to cheer, when not to cheer. Only Dillon Danis could break this monotony by clashing with a group of individuals Dana White characterized as “the entire Muslim Brotherhood” cage side.

It’s Ali Abdelaziz’s world, and we’re just living in it. He always seems to find a way to get camera time inside the UFC cage after every main event.

Why should any of this matter to fans? Because we are seeing a direct cause-and-effect between UFC’s business policy, the type of customer they are attracting, and ultimately the kind of fighter profile they want to recruit.

We’re watching a Hal Steinbrenner New York Yankees value extraction model married to John Fisher Sacramento A’s talent pay.

This strategy is naturally creating conflict and cognitive dissonance for veteran MMA fans. Just like current Yankee fans convincing themselves every year that they’re one signing away from winning the World Series, UFC fans have to gaslight and talk themselves into believing that the fights they are paying thousands of dollars to watch are actually competitive classics featuring high-level technique and masterful strategy.

There was a not-so-insignificant coterie of fans who talked themselves into believing that Zhang Weili and Jack Della Maddalena had a chance of beating Valentina Shevchenko and Islam Makhachev. This included half of our own predictions team believing that Maddalena could win a decision. After R1 on Saturday night, it became clear that this wasn’t much of a contest. There’s a reason Makhachev was a 75% odds-on-favorite.

I don’t blame anyone for believing in JDM or Weili. What I blame is our internal conflict as fans in having to try to talk ourselves into believing what the UFC is selling.

The top two fights at UFC 322 played out exactly as I imagined. But I don’t gamble on fights. I don’t break down a ton of fight film. Then again, I don’t really need to. Too many people, to maintain their current UFC fandom, have to outsmart themselves. They have to talk themselves into believing something that isn’t. Hope springs eternal, right?

Guess who wasn’t all that surprised about Saturday’s fight outcomes? Dana White. Our favorite brand ambassador all but admitted as much at the UFC 322 post-fight presser.

Valentina Shevchenko’s win was much more impressive in my eyes. She dominated on technique, pure and simple. Endeavor’s bad habit of having its commentators immediately push scripted excuses during commentary to justify the inevitable is excruciating. Size, size, size. And by the time this exercise was all over, Joe Rogan was busy with his “you’ve done everything, lady, what’s left and when you are going to retire?” routine.

In this proxy battle, the estimable Napoleon Blownapart got the symbolic win over Tom & Sam Gores-backed Hotshot Nick LoPiccolo. Not all heroes wear capes.

Complacency is a cancer

As for the rest of the UFC 322 fight card, most of the MSG fans had no idea who many of the fighters were. Sean Brady vs. Michael Morales was largely met with a resounding, “Who?” from this MSG crowd. Yet another fighter who missed weight, Beneil Dariush, got blitzed by Benoit Saint Denis in 16 seconds. Leon Edwards saw his career flash before his eyes when Carlos Prates sent him into concussion protocol.

The MSG fans came to see Zhang Weili and Islam Makhachev. Everyone else was a character actor.

Mark Shapiro was everywhere on screen. Ari was at cageside as usual, supervising. Hunter Campbell was there to shake every fighter’s hand after a win. Dana White was just along for the ride.

Khabib Nurmagomedov took the UFC title belt away from Dana to give to Islam Makhachev. Not even the fighters are pretending any longer about who’s really running this show.

I wish I could sit here and say that UFC 322 at MSG was an event full of surprises and unexpected happenings. I can’t. As the MMA on Point YouTube channel highlighted, 12 out of 14 favorites won their fights. Typical UFC matchmaking.

The only surprise is that current UFC fans continue to convince themselves that this time it’s different. The Yankees aren’t going to win the World Series any time soon, and UFC isn’t going to change its value extraction tactics.

Which brings us to the Paramount Era beginning in January 2026.

What was surprising was to hear from Dana White that UFC’s front office still has not finalized its January event plans. Are we really going to get Alex Pereira vs. Carlos Ulberg at T-Mobile Arena? What happened with the rumored plans of running the Intuit Dome in David Ellison’s Hollywood backyard?

Paramount is already preparing to raise prices — modestly — right before the UFC campaign kicks off. It will be of little surprise to see continuing price increases as we progress in this $7.7B, seven-year extravaganza of a deal.

But the pressure is on UFC now. Don’t be fooled by TKO’s Happy Talk. They got the bag, but now they’ve got to deliver. The spotlight is on UFC to make Paramount successful. Attracting five or six million new subscribers isn’t going to cut it. There’s a difference between a “UFC celebrity” versus a real celebrity, as we saw with crowd cameo reactions at UFC 322.

The current setup by UFC does not incentivize risk. We saw that on the top of the UFC 322 card. I suspect we’ll see more of this behavior in UFC’s PLE era.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Matt Kenny & Glenn Jacobs are jumping from ESPN to Paramount. Give our own Blake Avignon credit for being first to break that story publicly. Weeks before Puck and other Endeavor-flavored friendlies got the story.

Sean Shelby and Mick Maynard remain matchmakers. Mark Shapiro is running the show. Ari Emanuel is herding the very expensive cattle cage side and in the VIP suites to conduct his next business deals for MARI. Mark + Ari. Don’t you just love Hollywood marriages?

If complacency is a cash cow for TKO, why bother changing behavior?

Double-dipping and entering the Polymarket Era

Why wouldn’t a pseudo-sports promotion double down on a gambling scandal by signing a deal with yet another predictions-based gambling enterprise?

Pardon me for my rancid cynicism, but if you haven’t already picked up on the fact that current UFC ownership treats Madison Square Garden like a pit stop for Wall Street capital, then you aren’t paying enough attention.

Remember how hard Lorenzo Fertitta fought to get MMA sanctioned in New York in order to make it to Madison Square Garden?

A decade later, the actual fights at MSG are largely an afterthought to TKO. MSG week is when institutional capital and private equity make their moves with TKO.

Polymarket, like Kalshi, is yet again another “gray zone” area of gambling. TKO is now in bed with Polymarket.

There was UFC brand ambassador Dana White on CNBC with the Polymarket CEO, and naturally, the first question CNBC asked was how the deal was consummated.

“Actually, Ari (Emanuel) approached me.”

The irony, of course, is that the Nevada Gaming Commission has a very adversarial position on Kalshi and Polymarket. Someone with a gaming license, like Lorenzo Fertitta, wouldn’t be able to do business in this space. But the rules are different for our overlords at TKO, right?

What UFC gambling scandal?

While the UFC 322 broadcast was constantly bombarding viewers with DraftKings prop bet odds, the Polymarket Era promises to bring yet another layer of financialization to the UFC product.

It’s entirely predictable — ha, ha — that UFC spectators would get desensitized to this behavior and go along with the financialization. You’re already spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, so why now gamble a few hundred more on the fights?

What’s disheartening is just how programmable the UFC customer base truly is. A fight sport where the customer is demonstrating little fight in opposition to value extraction.

Then again, that seems to be the universal theme globally in fight sport. Paying more to get less. Just look at the crowd that the Conor Benn-Chris Eubanks fight drew Saturday afternoon.

You can’t bet against TKO’s process of value extraction. UFC’s yearly voyage to Madison Square Garden is proof positive of that.

Zach Arnold is the lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw Newsletter on Substack. You can e-mail him at fightopinion - at - protonmail dot com.