Back in 2009, Dana White swore that if UFC 100 did a million pay-per-view buys he’d bungee jump off the Mandalay Bay. (It did, he didn’t). When UFC 151 was canceled after Jon Jones refused an opponent switch, White called Jones’ coach, Greg Jackson, a “sport killer.” It left a crater in the UFC’s schedule that only MMA fans could fully appreciate.
A few years later, when Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz shattered the PPV record at UFC 196, it was a testament to how big the sport had become. We cared about those numbers as much as we did the outcome.
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Since UFC 1, when people paid out of morbid curiosity, pay-per-views have been a vital part of the identity of this sport.
It’s hard to get nostalgic over being gouged, and what follows here shouldn’t be mistaken as such, but Monday’s news of the UFC’s coming $7.7 billion partnership with Paramount came with a small pang of sadness upon realizing the PPV model will soon belong to a bygone era.
In our sport, people have long huddled around a UFC PPV as if it were a religious rite. When social media was gaining steam in the early-2010s, UFC PPVs were ladled out on Twitter (now X), 140 characters at a time from those on the ground level, as if they were transmissions from the war. Any MMA fan who didn’t spring for the then-$59.99 price tag suffered instant FOMO.
Why?
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Because getting the PPV meant attending the party. A sacrifice, it’s true, but also a shared experience. The price of admission kept unserious fans out. What lurked behind the paywall was the sport’s everything, and the feeling of camaraderie for any of us who willingly paid the door fees was priceless.
Brock Lesnar headlined UFC 100 in 2009, setting a then-record for UFC pay-per-view sales. (Photo by Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images)
(Jon P. Kopaloff via Getty Images)
A typical Monday conversation might go something like this:
“Did you get Saturday’s pay-per-view?”
“Damn right I did. That GSP is a freaking monster.”
“I can’t believe Dan Hardy didn’t tap.”
“Dude is Gumby!”
A UFC PPV stood for “can’t-miss event” for what was essentially a continuing saga — a long-running, fighting soap opera that early aficionados deemed sacred.
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Of course, it wasn’t nearly as hipster as it sounds. If nothing else, the UFC has always been anti-hipster. It gladly poured Monster Energy drink over men in capris. It was more like a monthly concentration of our greatest focus, to see firsthand the best the sport could offer, which gave MMA its sense of community. It was a choice that could be regretted in the end — anybody who sprung for UFC 149 from Calgary never fully recovered from that groin kick — yet it was a choice we made because we didn’t care for the alternative.
All of this largely held true into the 2020s, even though pirating and illegal streams have long done away with the sacrifice. A few years ago, Dana proclaimed he was going to go after pirates himself, and it was fun to imagine him in a suburban tree with his binoculars searching through windows for glitchy Russian streams.
But the writing has been on the wall for a long time that PPVs could be on the way out. The WWE, which is run by the same TKO ownership group as the UFC, came to that conclusion a couple of years back.
The UFC has been tied to a dying animal, and it will be for five more PPVs in 2025.
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Still, you worry about the sport of MMA losing some of the vital distinction that made it. UFC Fight Night events, especially those held at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas, have become skippable affairs. PPVs have always meant title fights, which the UFC has done a masterful job over the years of holding to high standards. To see belts change hands, you paid for it. Even if that feels a little heisty in 2025, it served to force a value in its structure and interest, to keep a premium on things.
To give title fights away, even at a subscription fee? Perhaps the value scale loses some of its natural escalation. The greatest fear is that things blend together, and the sport plays out on a gray plateau. Will the UFC even be as interested in developing stars without PPVs to sell them on?
The savings on the pocketbook can’t help but be a welcome thing for fans, ultimately. And who knows exactly how things are going to play out? Lester Bangs declared rock & roll dead in the 1970s, and some 50 years later there’s still a pulse. Right after TKO COO and president Mark Shapiro said the “PPV model was dead,” White wasn’t so quick to pull the plug.
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“A fight will pop up that I never saw coming,” White told the New York Post. “A star will pop up out of somewhere. Anything is possible. And you could do a one-off pay-per-view. I am going to be on pay-per-view this Saturday. Pay-per-view is not dead.”
But it’ll be dead in the sense we knew it. And what that means is a paradigm shift in the sport. Fighters will no longer be linked to PPV points, which has always been a story within the story. Diehard fans who’ve willingly paid for (or at least went through the trouble of illegally streaming) PPVs will now share the sport with the homogenized sports world at large.
Which I guess is the root of things. Homogeny is the scariest thing in combat sports. We didn’t miss Dude Wipes until we saw the Reebok fight kits. Then we understood some soul was being sucked out of our rogue sport. The closer to the mainstream the sport drifts, the more it loses some of its lifeblood.
It’s hard to be nostalgic about being gouged, it’s true, but you can’t help but be protective of what got us here. Or to remember that at one time there was some good bang for the buck.
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Back in the mid-aughts, the UFC combined the tuxedo affairs of 1990s boxing with the vibes of an underground temptation. From there it slowly stockpiled its greatest passions behind the paywall. Remember how red Dana’s face would turn as he tried to sell the PPV at the end of the televised portion of the card? Remember the names?
B.J. Penn. Matt Hughes. Chuck Liddell. Tito Ortiz. Randy Couture. Georges St-Pierre. Quinton Jackson. Jon Jones. Brock Lesnar. Cain Velasquez. Conor McGregor. Ronda Rousey. Go through the posters of the past, and they were the special attractions, the names on the marquee for the numbered events. Those were some good parties we shelled out for. As MMA fans, they were ours.
And if that passion is lost, those PPVs will seem like bargains next to the ultimate cost of business.
