White outlined ambitious growth plans after Zuffa Boxing’s UK debut and promised more major announcements soon
Dana White says Zuffa Boxing’s competition is no longer other boxing promoters but the biggest sports leagues in the world. Speaking after the company’s UK debut in Bournemouth, White pointed to the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and global soccer as the benchmarks he believes Zuffa Boxing must chase.
“People always ask me about, you know, ‘Oh, you’re competing with this, you’re competing with this guy,'” White said during the post-fight press conference following Zuffa Boxing’s UK debut in Bournemouth. “Right now, at the level that we’re at, we’re competing with the NFL. We’re competing with the NBA. We’re competing with Major League Baseball and with the NHL.
“You got to imagine, in the United States, the powerhouse over there is the NFL. And I’m sure when the NFL, when they were sitting in their executive offices and they saw the deal that we got with Paramount, they had to be thinking, ‘Wait a minute, there was $8 billion sitting over at Paramount that we didn’t get.’
“You know, we’ll start putting games on Tuesdays. And then when you go outside the United States, you start competing with soccer.
“When I think about my competition, those are the people that I’m looking at as competition these days.”
White also discussed Zuffa Boxing’s plans for expansion, pointing to additional events in both the United Kingdom and the United States.
“I’ve been saying to everybody, January 1st, judge us on the work that we did this year,” White said. “We’re going to continue. We’ve got so much. We’ve got a lot of big announcements coming up over the next month. So, you can expect lots of big things coming from us.”
“We have a Sky deal, which is a very big deal to us,” White added. “So, we’ll be in the UK a lot. And already this year in the United States, we’re going to be adding more fights to Paramount. I mean, we’re five months into this thing, and we’re already adding more shows on our Paramount deal. And I hope the same thing happens with Sky.”
