UFC fans unsatisfied as Endeavor execs are showered in cash

The take-private deal transforms TKO's owner into WME Group as angry fans are primed to mutiny if they ever figure out where their money goes

The stresses that have been long-building under the UFC in the Endeavor era are finally causing visible cracks in the product quality. UFC fans aren’t happy, and they are speaking out about it.

This has not been a good First Quarter of 2025 for UFC events. TKO’s system for extracting cash from media companies, fans, and government entities is working smoother than ever, but the matchmaking and fight cards have never been worse.

Good thing we’re already at the end of the Endeavor era.

Welcome to the WME Group era, UFC fans.

UFC fans are screaming at, not shilling for Dana White now

The video above, from Bedtime MMA, a 2-year-old YouTube channel with 70K subscribers, speaks to the zeitgeist of early 2025. Let’s hear from the Bedtime Whisperer:

These pay-per-views are so fucking wishy-washy. They're getting better this year. They were pretty inconsistent last year.

I think the fight nights like some of them are really good and then you get these APEX fights that just kill the momentum dead. That's a big thing that pisses me off.

The Contender series NPCs… we need to slow down the spawn rate. We're spawning in so many that it's becoming almost like comical how many are joining. Where you're just like who the fuck is this guy? And Dana White (is going) this kid's a marauder. This kid's going on the main card of the pay-per-view.

His 550+ comments are skewing overwhelmingly in favor of his take.

Back when I started warning about the inevitability of a decline in UFC quality (in 2012, lol, more proof that being early is the same as being wrong), the pushback was immense.

These days, there’s not a lot of pushback to complaints about the low (and dropping!) quality of UFC cards.

Even the “just the facts, ma’am” Tapology crew is putting the knife in, with facts:

Want to be depressed about the current state of MMA? Sick of "hardcores" simping for glorified gym leagues on janky 2025 streaming services? Think we're remembering the good old days with rose-colored glasses? Here are the last 10 UFC Fight Nights prior to the Endeavor era.

So, at least one smark out there is pinning the blame firmly on Endeavor. I’m glad someone’s on-topic. Thank you, Steven Kelliher.

Those ten fight nights featured multiple former champs (Junior dos Santos, Frank Mir, Anderson Silva, Michael Bisping, and Dominick Cruz), as well as crowd-pleasers (Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, Stephen “Wonderboy Thompson, Mark Hunt, Alistair Overeem), and in general a quantum leap in card quality from what we get in 2025.

In fairness to Endeavor, Zuffa’s successful monopolization of MMA set up Endeavor both to enjoy the massive profits they’ve made and for this relentless erosion in product quality.

While the 2015-16 Fight Card posters above may look like an impossible fantasyland to today’s quality-starved fan, in reality, Zuffa was cashing in on past promotional work (some of it by PRIDE) and using up established fighters while building nothing for the future.

But the reason I was celebrating someone, anyone, pinning the blame on Endeavor is that most of the MMA pundits are still falling for the Dana White show.

Talk about Dana White leaving is missing the story

Most of the UFC business-related chatter lately has riffed off of Tommy Toehold’s very successful speculative analysis for MMA on Point that Dana White is likely on his way out at the UFC.

While TT’s reasoning is sharp and his analysis very much worth watching, he barely has a news hook to hang this piece on.

And it’s clear no one is taking TKO’s recent SEC filings and their implications into account. Dana White, Ike Epstein, Hunter Campbell, Ari Emanuel, and company are rolling over their equity in TKO and even putting extra money into it. They’re not going anywhere — for now. Tax purposes, perhaps, but clearly they’ve got some more value extraction to do.

Readers of The MMA Draw know that Dana has not been running the UFC on the day-to-day in a while, leaving those duties to Hunter Campbell. More importantly, we’ve been trying to tell people for two years that Dana White is a non-factor in the TKO C-Suite. He’s just another talent asset under contract.

And most importantly, the speculation around Dana functions as a great big “Hey, look over there!” while the real buccaneer action happens in plain sight.

Namely, this week, the TKO parent company Endeavor’s take-private officially happened.

Why is this important for fans whose natural impulse is to ignore business news?

Well, when the product is getting ever more expensive but the quality is ever more diluted and stomped on, it might be informative, even enlightening, to know where the money is going.

Wall Street is been the place where the robber barons have pilfered hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars from UFC over the last decade to pay themselves and their benefactors handsomely. The Endeavor flywheel sucks up fans’ money like a vacuum cleaner, and puts only a tiny % back into the product.

What the general public is slowly catching on to is HOW they have been pulling off this magic trick. We’ve been at the forefront, pointing out some of the ways this has been done over the last two years, but now we’re starting to see a peek behind the curtain.

And once again, a majority of fans and analysts are reading the wrong tea leaves. Here is what you are missing and why you are paying so dearly for this.

Warning: lots of ugly financial details after the paywall.