Why UFC fans need to pay attention to WWE on Netflix

Monday's stream was a sneak preview of what Ari Emanuel has planned for MMA

The Rock celebrates Ari Emanuel & Mark Shapiro at RAW Netflix debut.

The world of combat sports economics changed Monday night in the United States.

4.9 million people globally watched RAW on Netflix.

Did you spot the giant magic trick Ari Emanuel and Endeavor/TKO pulled on paying customers?

It’s getting more expensive by the day to be a pro wrestling or fight fan. Much of that is by design. You’re paying more to get less while being convinced by the powers that be that you are getting great value… while they are value-extracting the hell out of you.

Four matches in a three-hour RAW show. How about five main card fights for a four-hour UFC PPV?

For fans who can’t exactly put their finger on why the fan experience feels wrong in today’s environment, let us raise some points and questions to get reader imaginations ignited so they can draw their own conclusions.

Fans are no longer the primary audience

This is a terrible, horrible, no-good concept to wrap one’s head around.

Despite paying exorbitant ticket prices, fans have less voting power than ever before. All the major power players in combat sports are oligarchs, world leaders, and world governments.

There are no more Bill Watts’ or Fritz Von Erichs left. True die-hards who lived and breathed financially by success or failure in the fight game. The people with the true knowledge can’t access the money anymore and those with the true money don’t necessarily care to learn the game the old-fashioned way, or at all.

Once this principle is understood, the multi-billionaire empire of Endeavor/TKO and its approach to the fight business has some dramatic clarity.

Ari Emanuel’s giant sales convention for billionaires

The number one audience for WWE’s debut on Netflix wasn’t the fans. It was the billionaire class. It was for individuals who see themselves as part of the Elite. Ironic given that WWE’s supposed competition AEW, is notoriously the toy of a billionaire’s often-distracted son.

Ari Emanuel is at his peak when he can accomplish two things at once: putting himself over and convincing others that if they get on board, the “Endeavor flywheel” can put them over too — for a price.

There was Ari, the man who the fight media will not name, sitting front row while The Rock was bragging about the record gate of the event. Rock was, in effect, congratulating his benefactors for extracting cash from fans who think they are actually the customer base.

Message to UFC fans — what we’re seeing from WWE on Netflix is a preview of coming attractions for the UFC.

WWE is a guinea pig. A very big one.

Ari Emanuel’s message to Netflix bosses Ted Sarandos and Bela Bajaria was very simple— you can have even more of this. Look at these fans celebrating paying record-high ticket prices. The customers are getting value extracted good and hard and they love it.

It was Ari Emanuel’s coming out party to fight fans. Look at me. I run the show. Writers now have permission to say his name without self-censoring themselves for a change. They won’t, though.

There’s a specific reason WWE held its debut on Netflix at Steve Ballmer’s new Intuit Dome.

Old Hollywood got married to New Hollywood on Monday night and the TKO triple monopoly of Endeavor, WWE, and UFC enabled this unholy alliance to swallow up the sports and entertainment worlds.

Vince McMahon had his Kiss My Ass club. Ari Emanuel’s version of the Kiss My Ass club involves politicians, Wall Street, and world governments. Throw in the rich and the famous, as long as they have some utility.

Don’t think that the Los Angeles fans ripping Hulk Hogan a new asshole was detrimental to the powers-that-be. If anything, it served to distract the masses from what is really going on. A nice shiny, diversionary toy. Boo the Hulkster, brother, but pay up.

Ari Emanuel has used the UFC & WWE brands to become the mogul he always wanted to be. He thought old-school Hollywood was his ticket and that taking over the vaunted William Morris Agency and then expanding into movie production would give him the keys to the kingdom.

Little did he know that Hollywood would implode and it would be his sleazy fight sports side hustles that would make him the entertainment emperor. Now he’s finally taking his role public.

The billionaire vision of a post-modern combat sports landscape

There is no better persuasion than visual persuasion.

That’s why YouTube has largely replaced text-based web sites.

RAW on Netflix was all about visual persuasion. This wasn’t a wrestling show. This was Hollywood shooting a movie with wrestling as a theme. This was Hollywood producing a live action motion picture with billions of dollars on the line.

The movie may be scripted but the consequences are as real as it gets, brother. Ask Hulk Hogan.

We noticed this dramatic shift in ideology for UFC’s big event at The Sphere. As we wrote about that particular event, UFC 306 was the night Endeavor's cemented its Sphere of Hollywood influence. That’s why Dana White was yelling that “his team” deserved an Emmy.

RAW on Netflix was very much a similar concept. We’ve moved on from Vince McMahon’s vision of fight sports as Disneyland and straight into Hollywood film-making.

Old-school wrestling or fight fans are rightly baffled by what they’re seeing and bewildered as to how things got to this point.

Fans who paid to see the the pure form of combat (or simulated combat) they used to love are right to feel a bit bait and switched.

In this new world of fight promotion, we are watching billionaires selling something very different from what fans are used to.

The one common factor between TKO’s WWE and UFC is that they are selling a derivative of fight sport, not the actual fight sport itself.

Take these two billionaires for example: Tony Khan and Ari Emanuel.

AEW and TKO represent two very different versions of sports entertainment in 2025 but both are post-modern versions of wrestling. It’s about the meta of wrestling, not about actually promoting wrestling.

AEW is more a Euro-style irony wrestling video game mixed in with gymnastics and Mystery Science Theater 3000 — with even less maturity. It’s serving up process as substance. Tony Khan and his spreadsheets and his obsession over ratings are part of the show.

Tony managed to get the media to cover the story of a billionaire getting a new TV deal the way they used to cover a pro wrestler chasing a world title. Once that process-oriented “chase” was over, so was the media interest in AEW.

AEW is nothing more than a new generation Live Action Role Playing what they saw a previous generation do for real. Tony Khan isn’t an actual wrestling promoter. We’re still not sure what he is.

TKO is a different post-modern fight product. It’s filming, marketing, and presenting WWE as a movie. For purists and hardcores, TKO is the Velveeta of fight sports.

They’re marketing and pushing a derivative of wrestling. They’ve calculated that they can sell a huge Netflix audience on the concept of wrestling rather than selling the wrestling itself.

This is where the celebrity factor comes in, Monday’s show was very Hollywood.

It’s all about the mass production of content and utilizing Hollywood’s old marketing strategies to turn fight sports into movies.

We all saw how this modern economic model turned out for Old Hollywood. First they focused everything on mega-franchises like The Marvel Universe or Star Wars. Fans were encouraged to be as invested in how big the opening weekend was for the new Avengers movie as what was actually on the screen.

This worked great, until it didn’t. Now Hollywood is desperately casting about for a new hustle.

Ari Emanuel and TKO are replicating that model with fight sports: extract maximum value for as long as they can before they eventually burn the combat sports/sports entertainment carcass to the ground.

Hyperfinancialization and mega-monopolies

The New Hollywood concept of UFC & WWE as billion-dollar monopolies doesn’t work without Ari Emanuel’s personal pet project powering the engine.

Endeavor has a near monopoly on talent representation whether anyone wants to admit it or not. Pick your man. Ari Emanuel. Patrick Whitesell. Egon Durban. Silver Lake. Their Mubadala-backed monopoly is critical to the TKO triple monopoly.

These three monopolies are powered by the world’s largest players in finance. Wall Street, Abu Dhabi & Saudi Arabia, Singapore. The world’s leading financial institutions and governmental investors are all tied into TKO.

This is the concept of hyperfinancialization. Financialization is the process of using paper and financial instruments to institutionalize debt. This isn’t someone running a lawn mowing operation and getting $100 per house. TKO is an operation utilizing leverage to obtain huge financing — such as a $500 million dollar margin loan.

No independent player can compete against this system.

Ari Emanuel’s vision of combat sports is the largest transformation in the history of pugilism. He’s financializing the product through the lens of politics, cultural power, and the weaponization of monopoly market power.

Endeavor is a monopoly in media representation and negotiation. They’re on every side of the deal. They represent major media networks and the personalities on those networks, plus the biggest digital podcasters and content creators.

UFC has a monopoly on Mixed Martial Arts.

WWE has a monopoly on professional wrestling.

Netflix is the clear king of subscription digital content streaming. Their competitors are desperately merging to try to keep up.

This TKO triple monopoly successfully recruited the big monopolies of high finance — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Canada, and others — to buy into TKO’s debt.

Much in the same manner that TKO has run up massive amounts of debt to finance management’s shopping sprees and pay themselves hundreds of millions of dollars, Netflix had its own massive debt funding campaign many years ago. At the time, it was viewed as risky and perhaps reckless. In the end, TKO and Netflix — as growing monopolies — understood that debt financing is less risky if the value of the US dollar is eroding.

They also understood that obtaining First Mover status in America is critical. And no matter how much Americans complain about monopolies, ultimately Bigger is Better.

A share of Costco costs what an ounce of gold used to cost. Amazon and Walmart remain dominant players. So much for the anti-Big Box campaigns.

Get First Mover status, build up monster Free Cash Flow, and institutionalize the debt financing by spreading the risk around to the biggest power brokers for protection. That’s what TKO and Netflix are both doing.

TKO’s transformation of combat sports economics has two-prongs:

1. guarantee as much revenue as possible and;

2. financialize the system.

By having the world’s biggest governments and banking institutions financing TKO, Ari Emanuel can trade off of TKO’s brand value as if his product were a commodity like oil or gold.

Their version of combat sports is a financial commodity embedded into the global financial system under the guise of a pseudo-financial instrument.

TKO’s hyper-financialization of fight sports is the largest change in the history of combat sports economics. We’ll get into the rumors and reports of TKO perhaps working with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and their boxing portfolio on another date, although this previous article yours truly wrote is a good road map:

The one pathway for UFC, boxing, and Saudi Arabia to get married.

How the billionaires changed customer psychology

Ari Emanuel has inverted the customer psychology of combat sports.

Fans are not really paying for a ticket to watch the show. They are paying for access or rather the illusion of access.

Ari knows how to do one thing really well — influence peddle and market celebrity. Real or fake, true or mirage.

Fans are no longer buying tickets simply to see a show. They’re paying for the right for perceived access. They’re paying for the right to even exist around people, perceived or marketed, as elite.

They’re paying for the billionaire’s time because that’s the customer base TKO cares about. Whether it’s customers buying tickets or citizens paying taxes to fund government contracts for shows, the oligarchs are in charge now. Combat sports is their playground and fans are paying for the right to breathe the same air that they do — for a few hours. Pay enough money and maybe Dana will leave his house. Maybe.

It’s why so much focus under Endeavor is about star power, but not the star power of the athletes and fighters. It’s about the star power of the oligarchs who are invested in the events.

If Ari can’t market his own star power, he’ll leech onto other star power like a parasite to put his brand over. Celebrity and worship is the name of his game and he is the master of promotion.

The great irony is that customers of TKO events in 2025 have less influence and power over management than they did under the Vince McMahon regime. The narrative that Vince would do anything to abuse his monopoly and put the screws to wrestlers and fans to suck the joy out of them was what gave perceived momentum to AEW.

Ari Emanuel has brilliantly managed to reverse this perception and it has killed AEW’s momentum on the other side of the trade.

The raw truth is that Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro only care what people like Ted Sarandos, Jamie Dimon, Donald Trump, and David Faber think. That is their audience.

Fans mean even less to them than fans meant to Vince or Dana White, but by the time fans realize this they will have pocketed billions of dollars.

Ari Emanuel’s vision with Endeavor buying UFC was to use the monopoly power from both fight sports and Hollywood to become a huge political contractor and cultural shaper.

UFC was utilized as a giant piggyback to obtain loans during COVID to save Endeavor. That had to be both amazing and humbling for Hollywood’s kingpin.

It was even more mind-blowing for the king of Hollywood access to discover what he had obtained with WWE. It wasn’t until Ari Emanuel grabbed WWE that he manifested his true power of an entertainment monopoly.

Netflix and TKO could officially kill PPV

The death march for PPV has long been discussed and perhaps celebrated.

In much the same way streaming is a new-age version of cable, Netflix is the new-age version of PPV.

With all of these mega-monopolies allied to rule combat sports, they all want guaranteed revenue. They don’t like “lumpy” economic models like PPV where nothing is guaranteed.

The fight business was built off the backs of stars having to deliver big crowds at the gate to get a percentage. It was built off of actually having to draw. Guaranteed contracts were — and still are — a hot-button issue in wrestling circles.

Now the powers-that-be want to completely eliminate risk from a financial model that was built 100% on risk incentives. We’re in a new world.

When I previously wrote that fans are no longer the primary customers for TKO, some scoffed.

But I was right, Ari’s clientele now is Hollywood. It’s world leaders and governments.

The end game is ultimately for TKO to try to cut a deal with Netflix for UFC. The dream scenario is to bargain for enough cash to leave PPV and run major international events with massive government contracts from the host countries.

This is why we pushed the concept of government contracts so hard over the last two years. We knew where the billionaires were taking this.

The ultimate endgame of Ari Emanuel’s marriage of the world’s biggest financial, media, and fight monopolies is to permanently stabilize and institutionalize his economic model. Beyond Too Big to Fail.

Many key players among the international elite own a piece of TKO, through debt or stock, and thus have an interest in protecting Ari’s monopolies. Silver Lake may ultimately push Ari Emanuel into retirement and grab complete control of Endeavor but the damage will already have been done.

RAW’s debut on Netflix was officially a marriage of the world’s biggest monopolies and we’re all bystanders watching the powers that be determine what fight related content we consume. Not based on how charismatic the stars are, and how compelling the match ups may be, but rather determined by which regime ponied up the most cash and what show they want to put on.

As TKO rapidly expands their financial footprint in 2025, it’s going to require extraordinary time and focus to cover all of the major behind-the-scenes machinations. We have been preparing for this moment for the last two years at The MMA Draw and are ready to meet the challenge.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.