‘I wasn’t very excited’… Dana White gives his opinion on how the UFC’s partnership with the WWE has benefitted the promotion

It's been just over a year since the UFC and WWE were merged under the TKO umbrella in what was a groundbreaking partnership.

In September 2023, it was announced that Endeavor Group Holdings, UFC and WWE would be formed into a new publicly traded company called TKO Group Holdings.

This merged the UFC and WWE under one umbrella, leading to excitement among the fanbase that there would be more crossover between the two organizations.

Photo by Michelle Farsi/Zuffa LLC

Dana White discusses the UFC's partnership with WWE

While there haven't been many crossovers within the ring and the Octagon, several UFC stars have attended live WWE events and even brought them into the ring.

The last to do so was interim heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall when the WWE landed at the Co-op Arena in Manchester.

When the merger was made public, UFC CEO Dana White admitted he was skeptical about it and stated that the UFC and WWE would remain as two separate products.

Despite this, the WWE recently held their NXT Battleground 2024 event at the UFC Apex, marking the first time the UFC Apex hosted a WWE event.

“Yeah, since we started the whole TKO thing it's been great. The synergies are really between, I would say more, the sponsorship and the production, how we've been able to work with both companies to streamline some of the costs that we had when we were separate,” White began to explain. explain in an interview with Sports Business Journal.

“You can see the stock is up $10 or $11 in the last three days, so it's on fire now, it's been a great experience. I wasn't very excited about working at a listed company, it doesn't seem like much fun to me, but it went well. I do what I do, they do what they do in the WWE.

“We have a good working relationship between us and the WWE, which we didn't have before TKO,” White continued.

Dana White talks UFC broadcast negotiations while dropping a major hint

The UFC is set to expire its current broadcast agreement with ESPN at the end of 2025, meaning negotiations on a new deal have already begun.

In January 2025, WWE's Monday Night Raw will enter into another groundbreaking partnership with streaming giant Netflix, with the product streaming exclusively on the platform in the future.

White has admitted that while the UFC is unlikely to land on a platform like Netflix, we could see a situation where separate UFC products air on different networks.

“I think if we start our negotiations in 2025, this thing could play out in a lot of different ways, obviously we could be with Disney and ESPN for many (more) years, or you could see all of our content being cut to pieces minced meat like WWE and NFL do, and different products go to different networks.

“I don't know how that will play out as we get closer to these negotiations, but it is a possibility (that we end up on Netflix),” White said.

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