The Endeavor era of UFC ownership has taught us two things:
First, they have decimated what was once the UFC’s most prized division. And second, Endeavor never misses a chance to miss a chance to book a mega-money home-run fight when possible. They would rather hit doubles and money-ball their margins than make history.
Jon Jones vs. Tom Aspinall is the last UFC mega-fight on the table in the foreseeable future, and they are playing a risky game of leverage over it.
This week’s edition of The MMA Draw podcast with Nate Wilcox & Zach Arnold zooms in on the current politics of the Jon Jones/Tom Aspinall fight negotiations and what the leverage plays are, and why so much of it is nonsense.
Then we zoom back and look historically at the UFC’s Heavyweight division. Why did Ari Emanuel destroy so much of the promotional goodwill that Frank & Lorenzo Fertitta built up in creating the most lucrative, dramatic Light Heavyweight & Heavyweight divisions that propelled UFC into a multi-billion dollar operation?
For the paid portion of our podcast, we have a no-holds-barred look at internal TKO politics and how (we suspect) leaks from potentially disgruntled actors are starting to bleed out in the public.
After selling the rights to a WrestleMania event in New Orleans for lots of cash, TKO suddenly reversed course and yanked the show for a location TBD. This is not a move that Vince McMahon would have ever pulled. So, why? Bidding war with London? Rumors of a long-term stay in Las Vegas?
What you are witnessing is the predictable endgame of TKO becoming a political mercenary and government contractor. Mark Shapiro laid out the entire strategy in December of 2023.
TKO COO Mark Shapiro's ruthless message to Team UFC & Team WWE
We finally got a peek at what the mindset currently is for TKO management. Three months after the assets of UFC & WWE merged into a holding company called TKO, COO Mark Shapiro made an appearance on a UBS conference call that was both horrifically painful yet psychologically fascinating to listen to – especially if you are a UFC or WWE fan that doesn’t live in a major metropolitan area.
With Team UFC starting to take over more of the duties for WWE operations, we are witnessing corporate politics at its very worst. A bifurcation of major operations with WWE & UFC, likely being merged into Las Vegas with production in Stamford.
Very few fight fans cared about this development, but now customers are taking notice of the politics of Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro. It’s starting to impact match quality, pricing of tickets, and overall television production. You’ve never had the privilege of paying more to get less. That sums up America in 2025.
And yet the dirty secret, should fans ever smarten up to it, is that there’s very little about TKO that is American these days. Their masters are world governments, who just happen to be TKO’s co-promoters.
And one of their (frozen) co-promoters, should US sanctions get lifted in the future, could return to the UFC orbit in a rather aggressive marketing role.
The transformation of UFC (and now WWE) into political contracting shops by Ari Emanuel and Mubadala’s Khaldoon Al Mubarak has been the most underreported fight business story over the last decade.
Everyone focuses on the shiny objects but ignores the most important elephants in the room. The most interesting fight co-promoters in 2025 are power players like Turki Alalshikh, Kirill Dmitriev, and Khaldoon Al Mubarak.
What does it mean for you? That’s why we are here to break all of this information down for our paid subscribers to The MMA Draw newsletter on Substack.
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