Why gambling scandals hurt UFC more than other sports

The UFC has done nothing to restore customer confidence.

Take away all the prop bets and parlays from UFC fights. What are MMA fans left with in 2025?

Sure, fans can watch 50 different promotions if they follow Caposa’s Twitter feed and have four monitors. But for the average, basic Joe Q. Public sports fan, how many of TKO’s UFC fights are truly tugging at the heartstrings in a calendar year? Maybe three or four?

Which means you have to have some reason to watch the interminable amount of sloppy kickboxing and grappling contests on APEX warehouse and Fight Night events. Even bottom-tier undercard fights on UFC-numbered events are no longer a guaranteed good time. Fans showing up later and later to UFC live events tells the story.

Nate Wilcox succinctly covered the latest UFC gambling scandal and the lack of transparency from multiple parties involved. We are days removed from whatever that was, and the public still has no idea what just happened.

Luckily for UFC, the Isaac Dulgarian fight happened during a North American sports weekend with CFL Playoffs, Game 7 of the World Series in Toronto, Oklahoma-Tennessee in college football, and a busy-but-still-largely-dreadful NFL slate of games.

There was a hue and cry from the terminally online fight fans bemoaning a lack of investigative coverage from The Usual Suspects in MMA opinion and analysis.

Unfortunately for UFC, Monday arrived, and frustrated gamblers wanted to know what the hell just happened at the APEX.

Flame-throwing MMA opinionist Ant Evans expressed his disgust at the current industry’s state-of-affairs:

I’ll save my investigative analysis on the Isaac Dulgarian fight and what may have happened, and publish it after Wednesday’s TKO conference call with Mark Shapiro.

I don’t expect to hear any details regarding investigations from Mr. Shapiro.

Nor do I expect much public scrutiny from analysts working at institutional investment firms that own TKO stock or debt. Other than the usual half-baked “can you comment on…” type of open-ended questions that create multiple pathways to avoid direct answers.

What happens behind closed doors may tell a different story.

However, I do think Ant Evans deserves an answer as to how the hell we got to a place in UFC 2025 fandom where gambling is the only reason anyone watches TKO’s current product. Out-of-control degenerate gambling is a contributing factor, and the consistent engagement it generates is part of how Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro were able to convince David Ellison to pony up $7.7B over seven years for UFC media rights for Paramount.

Let me share with you the moment I was taken aback last year by the manipulation of UFC’s gambling campaign on their customers. It was a flashpoint that I will never forget.