UFC landed a $7.7bn deal with Paramount. But is Dana White's Trump bond a liability?

The Guardian

a day ago

Forget for a moment the stereotype that MMA athletes and their fans are All-American bar fighters. The MMA community is far more diverse and far more cerebral than the casual onlooker realizes.
Has Dana White forgotten that?
The UFC president has long sought to expand the sport's appeal to as many demographics as possible. But in the past few years, he has bet big on a tight affiliation with Donald Trump, who has been perfectly content to revel in the adulation of one segment of the population while heaping scorn upon all others. White has campaigned for Trump, welcomed him to several UFC events and hasn't immediately smacked down the notion of holding a UFC card at the White House.
On the surface, that might seem logical. MMA culture is intertwined with bro culture, and bros are considered the antithesis of 'woke' liberalism.
But it's not that simple. Consider a startling fact: while Maga champions an 'America First' ideology, the UFC is a paragon of globalism. Of the 11 reigning UFC champions, only one is American – Kayla Harrison, thriving in an organization White once insisted would exclude women. Both Australia and Georgia (the country) boast twice as many champions as the UFC's home country. The only belt firmly held by US fighters is the unofficial 'BMF' (Baddest Motherfucker) belt. White invented this to reward charismatic fighters who put on great shows. While it's a clever way to encourage personality and panache, it also seems like a DEI program to ensure US fighters remain prominent in the UFC pantheon.
So the UFC roster is more global than ever. But UFC fighters have never fit neatly into categories.
This diversity was a hallmark of the reality show that broke the UFC into the mainstream, The Ultimate Fighter. The casts included cerebral chess players, devout Christians and someone who brought a compass to ensure that his bed would face north, and another who fled the show to reassure his girlfriend that rumors she saw online weren't true.
And the UFC evolved in ways that might be considered 'progressive.' Cain Velasquez didn't lose any noticeable fan support in 2010 when he sported a 'Brown Pride' tattoo across his chest and admitted that his father had immigrated illegally. (Velasquez has since been sentenced to prison for issues unrelated to immigration.) After opposing the idea of female fighters for many years, White threw open the octagon door to Ronda Rousey in a 2013 bout against Liz Carmouche, who was openly gay. White strongly supported Carmouche and even gave an impassioned plea to legalize gay marriage wherever it wasn't already recognized – a position he stated well before a series of landmark US supreme court decisions upheld that right. Four years later, UFC fighter Jessica Andrade proposed to her girlfriend in her postfight interview in the octagon. While the UFC sold Pride Month gear and gave proceeds to an LGBTQIA+ organization in Nevada, outspoken Trump supporter Colby Covington emerged as one of the sport's biggest villains.
Still, the UFC's primary demographic of young adult men proved to be a decisive force for Trump's return to the presidency. This group overlaps significantly with the audience for UFC commentator Joe Rogan's popular podcast, and Rogan – who felt ostracized by the left after touting scientifically unsound Covid treatments – endorsed Trump last year.
But that was November. Fast forward to this summer, and this demographic has veered sharply against Trump. Rogan himself has broken with the president over tariffs, deportations and the Epstein files. Last month, Rogan told podcast guest James Talarico, a Texas Democrat, that he should run for the White House. There's a case to be made that if the Kamala Harris campaign had managed to get her on Rogan's podcast last fall, we would have a different president today.
Such changes shouldn't be a surprise. Rogan himself is always on the lookout for new ideas – if anything, he's a little too receptive to some schools of thought and doesn't push back or check facts. While older Americans are prone to adopting a party and sticking with it come hell or high water, Gen Z is fiercely independent politically. They're also more diverse than previous generations, more likely to be non-white, LGBTQ+ or any other group that may feel aggrieved by Trump's actions since reclaiming the presidency. Younger generations are also much more receptive to socialism than prior ones – after all, young men made enough of a fuss over Bernie Sanders to warrant the term 'Bernie Bros.'
So Maga's place in 'bro culture' – and those who are MMA fans – is by no means secure. And one day, Donald Trump will be out of office. We've already seen that US conservatives are eager to abandon one trend for another. Today's Maga supporters had a decidedly different message when the Tea Party reigned supreme. Two decades after calling Democrats 'traitors' for opposing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they excommunicated the entire Bush family.
Trump's popularity may well be on the slide too. His approval rating has tanked, and his mutable responses to the Jeffrey Epstein saga have fractured his base. The UFC may well be losing as many fans as its attracts by aligning itself with Trump.
The UFC, meanwhile, is still a strong brand but perhaps not the hot property it was a few years ago. Last week's Disney earnings report made a brief reference to 'lower Ultimate Fighting Championship pay-per-view fees due to lower average buys per event.' The fight game tends to be cyclical, driven by big personalities like Rousey, Jon Jones and Conor McGregor, all of whom have either left the sport or gone through a prolonged period of inactivity. It's tough to imagine current light heavyweight champion Magomed Ankalaev reaching the level of fame of Forrest Griffin, Rampage Jackson or Chuck Liddell. While we can't really quantify the impact of the Trump lovefest on the UFC's popularity, the organization clearly can't afford to alienate the 60% or so of the population that disapproves of Trump's presidency thus far.
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Perhaps this is one reason why the UFC has just opted for a new media deal that breaks from their pay-per-view model in order to get wider exposure. 'This shift in distribution strategy will unlock greater accessibility and discoverability for sports fans,' said the press release announcing the seven-year, $7.7bn deal. Some fight cards will be on network TV, and others will be free to subscribers of their streaming partner.
That streaming partner, though, is Paramount, which has also drawn the ire of many US viewers through a series of moves that appear to be a capitulation to the president's desire to control the media. First, Paramount settled a lawsuit over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview, a lawsuit deemed by many legal scholars as rather simple for Paramount to win, at the same time that the media conglomerate sought government approval for a merger. Second, after TV host Stephen Colbert criticized his parent company for settling the suit, Paramount announced that his show will end in 2026, ostensibly for financial reasons even though it is the highest-rated late-night show. (Fox News Channel claims its show Gutfeld! has higher ratings, but it airs earlier than the traditional late-night window that starts at 11.30pm Eastern time.)
Still, the decision to move away from the pay-per-view model can only be seen as a sign that the UFC feels the need to make its big tent a bit bigger as it faces the difficult challenge of keeping US fans interested in a sport in which American athletes are far from dominant. Typically, US sports broadcasters gravitate to events in which US athletes are faring well, which is why Olympic coverage focuses far more attention on swimming and snowboarding than, say, table tennis or biathlon.
White and Trump were always an odd match. Trump was involved with Affliction, a rival MMA organization of the late 2000s that White fought with the venom of the Trump administration's attacks on Harvard and the media. Trump has ridiculed veterans, dating back to when he said he didn't consider John McCain a war hero because he likes 'people who weren't captured' and continuing with Ice arrests of veterans in his second term and a recent awkward moment in which he turned attention to himself at a ceremony honoring Purple Heart recipients; White and the UFC are staunch supporters of the Wounded Warrior Project and other veterans' groups. White is an affable philanthropist; Trump used funds from his own foundation on a portrait of himself and his presidential campaign.
We probably won't see White publicly repudiate Trump, a move that wouldn't sit well with a sizable portion of UFC's audience. But over the years, White has shrewdly expanded the UFC fanbase, and he would dearly love for his sport to be the biggest in the world. White has already pronounced that his involvement with politics ends with Trump, telling The New Yorker last year that: 'I'm never fucking doing this again. I want nothing to do with this shit. It's gross. It's disgusting. I want nothing to do with politics.'
White has changed his mind about many things over the years. He brought in Kimbo Slice not long after denigrating his fighting skills. He brought women into the cage. But those moves were driven by popular uprisings, and White is almost always willing to give fans what they want. While much of the country watches in horror as Medicaid is slashed, Gaza's suffering gets worse by the week, the economy teeters on the brink, and the White House is in crisis mode trying to deflect from the Epstein case, the clamor to make White reassert his position at Trump's side will surely be muted.