UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) fans have been missing Saturday from their calendars for months. They were all looking forward to the long-awaited return of former UFC featherweight and lightweight champion Conor McGregor at UFC 303. But a broken toe just two weeks before the fight derailed those plans.
Instead, viewers are seeing what could ultimately be a much better rivalry between light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira and former champion Jiri Prochazka. This fight will be a rematch between the two fighters who last met in November 2023. That first fight was a back and forth affair, with each fighter landing some heavy blows and tackles. Ferreira won by TKO after knocking Prochazka to the ground with a devastating hook and delivering some old-fashioned pounding with punches and elbows before the referee stopped the fight.
This time, the two will fight in front of more than 20,000 fans at a sold-out T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, with an estimated 2 million watching at home.
UFC 303 is expected to bring in a record $20 million purse, the highest ever for the most dominant league in the world of mixed martial arts (MMA). The UFC was recently valued at a whopping $11.3 billion.
But the UFC is more than just a sports sensation that lures fight fans and inexperienced onlookers to expensive pay-per-view events with the promise of violence and excitement. This league is a cultural phenomenon. It has made fighters celebrities, created new expectations for what fighting looks like in movies and media, and even intersects with national politics.
In fact, how the UFC has grown to become what it is today says a lot about America and where American politics is headed.
Why the UFC became so big
UFC wasn’t always big. It was unpolished in its early days. One of the company’s slogans was “No Rules.”
The unregulated violence led Senator John McCain to call the UFC “human cockfighting.” A lifelong boxing fan, he wrote letters to the governors of every state asking them to ban the organization’s events, saying, “I’ve seen people getting punched in the face and repeatedly punched by people sitting on them. That’s not sport!”
“It sent (the UFC) into a really terrible place. It started with Pay-Per-View. “A lot of states didn’t want anything to do with it and would stop playing at the last minute,” said Luke Thomas, a combat sports analyst for CBS Sports. Today, description podcast. “And then in January of 2001, the guys who originally founded the UFC threw in the towel. They sold it for $2 million to Dana White, (and) Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta.”
The UFC’s new owners also had their difficulties. Then Donald Trump called and said, as White said on the podcast, “Come to my house. I’ll meet you at the Taj Mahal.”
Trump’s invitation may have helped the UFC’s new owners in the short term, but it really came at a time when America’s love of reality TV in the early 2000s was picking up steam and creating a reality TV series. ultimate fighter Spike TV says the league’s fate has changed.
“It gave a whole new perspective to the general audience who might have heard of the UFC.” Thomas said. “At the height of the reality TV show boom, the world got to see some truly unique people do some truly crazy things. And it worked!”
And the success of the first season led to more seasons. It led to a deal with ESPN. The UFC was eventually rated as a multi-billion dollar sports organization. And since then, its value and status culturally have improved.
How MMA turned into MAGA
Journalist Sam Eagan has long been a fan of combat sports. He frequently writes and podcasts about UFC, MMA, and domestic extremism. And he says he began seeing themes overlap after reporting on the growth of neo-Nazi fight clubs in the United States.
“I would say that fighting is not inherently a conservative sport, but it comes across as an individual thing. It’s one person competing against another in a very violent and dominant way,” Egan said. Today, description Podcast. “So there’s a theme of domination and violence, and really, really with the far right… there’s a very easy parallel in MMA as well.”
But where Eagan overlaps is not in the extremes. He points to the 2016 Republican National Convention, where Dana White became one of the first to publicly endorse Trump.
“For over 15 years, Donald Trump has been a loyal and supportive friend,” White said. “And I know that if I need Donald, he will be there for me, just as he was when I first met him.”
Shortly thereafter, Trump was elected president. But it wasn’t popular in 2019. He was booed during the World Series in Washington, DC. “So he showed up at a UFC event not long after and, you know, it got the full treatment, the cameras were focused on him, the fighters were cheering his name and talking about him in the post-fight interviews. ” Egan says:
Trump will continue to appear regularly at events for the next few years, but Eagan says 2023 will be the year he really takes off. “By my count, he’s only appeared at three separate events that year,” he says. “And as I watched this, I realized that it felt like Trump’s campaign was on hiatus.”
“I’m sure there will be more ahead of the election.”
But Dana White isn’t the only one showing love for the former president. Former title contender Colby Covington has built an entire persona around being a Trump fan. He’s always wearing a MAGA hat. In post-fight interviews, he yells at first responders, military personnel, and Trump himself. And he regularly throws around phrases like “fake news.”
Jorge Masvidal, a Cuban-American fighter from Florida, has staged a series of pro-Trump rallies called Fighters Against Socialism. “We have to reelect President Trump and keep America great,” Masvidal said at one rally. “Or we have to let Joe Biden destroy the greatest country the world has ever seen.”
Despite the UFC’s growing popularity and its owners’ and fighters’ embrace of conservative politics, Egan said, “I don’t think the UFC will have any influence on the election (for Trump).”
But he believes that by embracing UFC and combat sports, Trump has created a kind of blueprint for appealing to young men who are “vaguely conservative but generally apolitical.”
According to sports data site IMG Arena, 75% of UFC fans are male, and 88% of them are between the ages of 18 and 44.
This is a demographic that any candidate would be happy to tap into.
