At TKO, they love the game - just not the fight game
Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro, Dana White and Hunter Campbell are having fun.
As I marveled at TKO’s ability to slap together a fan-pleasing card Saturday night — no easy feat with Brian Ortega dropping out of the co-main on fight day — I thought I’d write a piece called “Ari Emanuel has no love for the fight game.”
The basic jist was going to be that strip-mining the roster of stars while upping the number of events means that the quality of the fights is relentlessly eroded.
I pulled a bunch of articles talking about how Disney’s move to a blockbusters and blockbusters-only strategy in the 2010s ultimately led the movie industry to a dead end.
Don’t worry, I’ll still use all that crap in this piece but you’ll have to wait a bit.
After thinking about the piece a bit more, I realized I’m selling Ari and the whole TKO gang short.
They’ve got a deep and abiding love of the game, the nuanced and deeply knowledgeable kind that only true masters have.
It’s just that the game they love has nothing to do with fights.
The game they play at TKO is manipulating human capital, both-sidesing negotiations and extracting maximum value.
Oh yea, and extracting taxpayer dollars from captured local governments like Las Vegas which paid to host the card.
Ari Gold modeled how to be a boss for Dana White
As anyone old enough to remember Entourage knows, working with or for Ari Emanuel is fun as shit.
For those who don’t remember Entourage, it’s a barely fictionalized caricature of Ari and his associates back when he was just the newly crowned top agent in Hollywood.
It’s essential viewing if you want to understand Ari’s game at even the most superficial layer.
Also, I guarantee you Dana White never missed an episode.
Either that… or it’s just a huge coincidence that his whole brash, foul-mouthed, flagrantly scumbag persona is a carbon copy of Ari Gold, just tweaked to be king fight promoter instead of king Hollywood agent.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Dana White does love the fight game. So do the Fertitta Brothers. Their tenure at Zuffa, for all the shit they did to monopolize the sport, showed the touch of a team who loved the fight game.
In particular, the Zuffa bros loved the MMA version of the fight game and carefully stewarded it into the American mainstream.
By the end of their tenure, they had firmly established MMA as the combat sport of combat sports in the minds of most American men.
Even hardcore boxing fans who couldn’t stand watching MMA, had to admit that most MMA champs could mop the floor with any boxer in a “real fight.”
The Fertittas sold out at the right time, because had they hung on past 2016, they would have had to break their low fighter pay model to keep Conor McGregor in the Octagon.
And they would have.
There is zero chance that the Fertittas would have signed off on Conor McGregor vs Floyd Mayweather under boxing rules.
But that would have been the end of “The UFC business model” that kept fighter pay below 20% of gross revenue.
Ari Emanuel is the only one ruthless enough to throw the sport of MMA overboard to protect UFC profit margins.
Sure, long-term that’s going to be a disaster for the sport — almost as big a one as keeping fighter pay artificially suppressed — but again, that’s not the game Ari is playing.
Ari refuses to let fan interest determine TKO’s profitability the way the Democratic party refuses to let its voters select their choice of candidates in “the most important election of our lifetimes.”®
Ari’s busy putting the fix in, whether it’s locking in deals with streaming media companies that pay the same event fees regardless of fan interest or working TKO’s side gig as a government contractor (what our own Zach Arnold calls “Combat Capitalism with Chinese characteristics.”)
In praise of UFC 303
Before I get carried away with being a negative creep, I do want to applaud Hunter Campbell, Mick Maynard, & Sean Shelby (and maybe Dana even rolled up his sleeves and helped) on putting together a serviceable UFC card on just two weeks notice after both the Conor McGregor main event and the co-main Jamahal Hill fights evaporated.
Pulling an Alex Pereira vs. Jiří Procházka rematch out of their asses was quite a feat and seemed to do a good job of capturing fan interest based on the gate:
With 18,881 in attendance, the total gate was announced at $15.9 million for an event that culminated a busy week for sports in Las Vegas, which also hosted International Fight Week and the NHL Draft at the Sphere.
Despite McGregor pulling out of his fight with Michael Chandler, UFC president Dana White still expected to break the gate record of $17.7 million set at UFC 205, which attracted 20,427 fans on Nov. 12, 2016 at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
They are incredibly lucky that Pereira entered MMA from kickboxing where he’d already established a rivalry with Israel Adesanya and went on to match and surpass his old rival in accomplishments and popularity.
He came through again with a quick KO win over Procházka that seemed to overshadow the weakness of the rest of the card.
I won’t even go into how much the outcome of this rematch reminded me of another last-minute card saver: Makhachev vs. Volkanovski 2 from last October.
Rushing fighters into rematches like this almost guarantees there won’t be any need for a rubber match.
Short-term, it’s great. Long-term, they’re degrading the sport.
The replacement co-main event of Brian Ortega vs Diego Lopes fell apart on Saturday, and it was while it was impressive they managed to scrape up Dan Ige and put on a fight, it wasn’t a good one. Neither were the other fights on the main card.
Now on with the point of this piece.
TKO is Disney to Zuffa’s Marvel Comics
Here’s a little quote from a 2023 New Yorker about the transformation of Marvel Comics after it’s purchase for $4 billion by Disney. Does that figure remind you of anything?
Anyway here’s the bit about Marvel’s transformation:
Cut to 2010. …The previous year, after Marvel’s first film, “Iron Man,” earned more than five hundred million dollars, Disney had acquired the studio for four billion dollars. It now occupied a sprawling campus in Manhattan Beach, with its own soundstages.
…Hollywood has always had sequels, but the M.C.U. is a web of interconnecting plots: new characters are introduced, either in their own movies or as side players in someone else’s, then collide in climactic Avengers films. In the seventies, “Jaws” and “Star Wars” gave Hollywood a new model for making money: the endlessly promoted summer blockbuster. The M.C.U. multiplied the formula, so that each blockbuster begets another. David Crow, a senior editor for the Web site Den of Geek, calls it a “roadmap for a product that never ends.”
The parallel with TKO is obvious.
The Marvel machine was pumping out a lot of content. Did it get to the point where there was just too much, and they were burning people out?
Where old Marvel Comics had been primarily focused on creating characters and writing stories that would compel fan interest, Disney era Marvel just wanted to milk the existing “intellectual property” for blockbuster movies.
Where UFC Zuffa wanted to sign up all the best fighters and put on all the best fights, TKO era UFC is slapping together events at the last minute while they focus on shit like this instead:
And this:
Note the part I highlighted — it’s a classic example of how Ari works all the angles and a reminder that Endeavor is the dog. TKO is just the tail that shits out cash.
The problem with this approach is eventually even the stupidest fan base on Earth, one that is rigorously flushed every five years and replaced with a younger and even stupider coterie, will tire of a subpar product.
That’s the warning that Disney’s experience with the Marvel Comics Universe is sending anyway:
Twenty years ago, few people would have bet that a struggling comic-book company would turn a bunch of second-string superheroes into movie icons—much less swallow the film industry whole. Yet the Marvel phenomenon has yanked Hollywood into a franchise-drunk new era, in which intellectual property, more than star power or directorial vision, drives what gets made, with studios scrambling to cobble together their own fictional universes.
Marvel’s success, he added, has “sucked the air out of” more human-scaled entertainments. Whole species of movies—adult dramas, rom-coms—have become endangered, since audiences are happy to wait and stream “Tár” or “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” or to get their grownup kicks from such series as “Succession” or “The White Lotus.” Yet even prestige television has become overrun with Marvel, “Star Wars,” and “The Lord of the Rings” series, which use the small screen to map out new corners of their trademarked galaxies.
Notice how Disney’s approach gleefully sawed away at key structural aspects of the movie industry because they were relentlessly focused on “maximizing value” by focusing on comic book blockbusters and nothing else.
There’s a similar lack of quality control at the UFC as this Twitter exchange shows:
Made me think of The Fyre Festival.
But back to Marvel:
It can be dispiriting to see so much acting talent sucked into the quantum realm of the M.C.U., presumably for a tidy sum, but the paychecks alone don’t explain Marvel’s hold over stars. …
The result is a lot of hand-wringing over “the death of the movie star.” In an I.P.-driven ecosystem, individual stars no longer attract audiences to theatres the way they used to, with a handful of exceptions (Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts). You go to a Marvel movie to see Captain America, not Chris Evans. “It’s actually surprising to me how almost none of them have careers outside of the Marvel universe,” another agent said. “The movies don’t work. Look at all the ones Robert Downey, Jr., has tried to do. Look at Tom Holland. It’s been bomb after bomb after bomb.”
That article was written in 2023 when the MCU still seemed like a good idea.
Just one year later:
The Verge zeroed in on one key issue — quality control:
….the absolute stinker Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness …was where Disney really went off the rails into making truly awful films we’re expected to see because we all love a “shared universe.”
And that’s the bigger issue here. Disney’s been making garbage, which makes people less inclined to watch new stuff on the off chance it’s garbage, too. Films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Thor: Love and Thunder have occasionally cool moments in them, pasted together by increasingly shoddy CGI and far too much focus on reminding us of the bigger cinematic universe instead of giving us the well-made adventure films that were the engine of the MCU’s success for a very long time.
Variety echoed the concern:
…“The Marvel machine was pumping out a lot of content. Did it get to the point where there was just too much, and they were burning people out on superheroes? It’s possible,” says Wall Street analyst Eric Handler, who covers Disney. “The more you do, the tougher it is to maintain quality. They tried experimenting with breaking in some new characters, like Shang-Chi and Eternals, with mixed results. With budgets as big as these, you need home runs.”
The Variety piece also discusses another difficulty Disney has faced with Marvel — banking on human beings.
The most pressing issue to be discussed at the retreat was what to do about Jonathan Majors, the actor who had been poised to carry the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but instead is headed to a high-profile trial in New York later this month on domestic violence charges. The actor insists he is the victim, but the damage to his reputation and the chance he could lose the case has forced Marvel to reconsider its plans to center the next phase of its interlocking slate of sequels, spinoffs and series around Majors’ villainous character, Kang the Conqueror.
Remind anyone of Conor McGregor?
Now you see why there is such a mad rush by TKO management to gobble up as many government contracts as possible.
UFC coming attractions headed off a cliff?
The thing about sailing along a roaring river at a high rate of speed is that if there’s a huge waterfall coming up, you can’t see it coming.
Right now UFC 304, the July PPV, seems solid as it pairs two British champs in the main and co-main.
Welterweight champ Leon Edwards isn’t a huge star but he’s on his third title defense and hopefully, there’s some interest in his rematch with Belal Muhammad after their 2021 bout ended in an unsatisfying No Contest following an eye poke.
Unfortunately, 8 out of the two headliners’ last 10 fights have gone to decision.
The co-main features interim heavyweight Tom Aspinall rematching Curtis Blaydes. Their previous fight also ended on an unsatisfying note when Blaydes lost via knee injury TKO.
As long as both of those fights don’t fall apart, 304 should be good.
August’s 305 has a middleweight title fight pitting champ Dricus du Plessis vs. former champ Israel Adesanya which is perfect for Perth.
The ominous part is they’ve announced no other fights for the card.
And from there the schedule is nothing but speculation.
Dana White has a hole card:
“It’s been challenging, but fun,” White said of a chaotic card littered with replacement fighters. “What happens is that we have built up this trust level with our fan base that they know when they show up that we’re going to put on a good show.”
September’s UFC 306 aka Riyadh Season Noche UFC at the Sphere will feature a rematch of Saturday’s Diego Lopes vs Dan Ige bout and maybe, just maybe the return of Conor McGregor.
Truly it’s better to be lucky than good, but so far Dana White has been Ari Emanuel’s lucky charm.
The problem is Ari is hell-bent on eroding that bond of trust Dana and the Fertittas built with UFC fans.
Let’s see how long they can keep coming up with passable headliners even as they relentlessly termite the support beams of the UFC business and turn the sawdust into quick cash.
In the meantime, there are lots of governmental money marks out there, some of whom will even sponsor a show on the other side of the planet:
Look no further than the upcoming UFC card in Saudi Arabia on June 22 as the perfect example. The Middle Eastern country reportedly paid around $20 million to bring UFC there for the first time. Weeks before the event takes place, Turki Alalshikh, the chairmen of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, announced that he struck a new deal with UFC to bring another event to his country in 2025, and that Riyadh Season — the annual music, arts, and sports festival — will sponsor the upcoming UFC 306 card in September at Sphere in Las Vegas.
Conor McGregor with a safety net of Saudi cash. Looks like Dana Hunter’s pulled another rabbit out of his hat.
It's been a hell of a year so far financially and politically for TKO. What's happening now in Washington is a perfect recipe for the UFC business model forthcoming...