Donald Trump turns 80 tomorrow. To celebrate his birthday and the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) will kick off what its president and CEO Dana White has called a “historic sporting event” inside a 600-ton fighting ring on the White House South Lawn.
The White House is letting the UFC call the shots for the event, going as far as to give the company control over which reporters can cover it, according to The New Republic. Tickets to UFC Freedom 250, as the event is known, are allegedly free, but to get in you need approval from Trump. This has generated an orgy of corruption, as sponsorship packages that include ringside seats for the event have gone for more than $1 million. Two of the event sponsors have given millions to Trump super PACs. There’s also a $1 million-per-head fundraiser at Trump’s golf club scheduled the night before, with many of the high-roller UFC attendees expected to attend.
But the matches, a kind of coming-out party on the national stage for the mixed martial arts (MMA) giant, also highlight the cutthroat means by which the UFC climbed to the top, often at the expense of its own fighters. In a long-running $5 billion antitrust lawsuit challenging the company’s monopsony power, MMA athletes Cung Le, Nathan Quarry, Jon Fitch, Brandon Vera, Luis Javier Vazquez, and Kyle Kingsbury have argued that the UFC has suppressed wages, and locked fighters into long-term contracts that effectively prevent them from signing with other promoters if they decide to leave the UFC.
This is the story you won’t hear above the din of the White House hype machine (which is only apt, since Trump recently bought stock in TKO, the UFC’s parent company) and thousands of screaming spectators, many of them military service members cosplaying as fans.
Today, professional MMA is one of the fastest-growing spectator sports globally, and its rise has been driven in large part by the UFC. The company has spent the past two decades concentrating its market power; White even made it onto the cover of Time magazine this month.
Yet White has been called out for his stinginess toward the fighters who are the main attraction for any UFC fight night. Fighter shares of total UFC revenues have historically trailed those of their boxing counterparts, and they fell as the sport grew more popular, from 26 percent in 2007 to 20 percent a decade later. What’s more, UFC contracts include stringent noncompete clauses and a so-called yearlong “right to match” provision, which allows the company to retain fighters by matching any competing offer they receive from another promoter at the end of their contract.
The original lawsuit, filed in 2014, was settled for $375 million. A new lawsuit for fighters who participated in UFC fights after 2017 is still active, and White testified in that case in February. The case is ongoing.
Restrictive contracts helped the UFC gain total control of MMA, as its competitors eventually went out of business or were subsumed into the UFC borg; the company purchased World Fighting Alliance, World Extreme Cagefighting, Pride Fighting Championships, the International Fight League, and Strikeforce over a decade-long stretch.
The UFC is continuing that dominance. TKO is the product of a merger between the UFC’s former parent company Zuffa and WWE in September 2023. As The Lever reported, the company is now lobbying Congress for an exemption to various boxing regulations that protect fighters for its subsidiary Zuffa Boxing. The UFC has ditched pay-per-view and appears on Paramount+, the streaming network of the company owned by Trump ally David Ellison, which is seeking to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery. Ellison gave the UFC a $7.7 billion broadcast rights deal.
White has credited Trump with giving the UFC its “first shot.” In 2001, Trump allowed the UFC to put on two consecutive events at his since-bankrupt Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Prior to that point, the company had been relegated to small venues in states like Mississippi and Alabama. Professional MMA was once regarded as a fringe sport, with critics likening it to “human cockfighting,” 36 states outright banning it, and large cable pay-per-view platforms refusing to air UFC events.
With the White House event, Trump is still extending a helping hand to the UFC, and that is poised to continue. The Trump administration signed an agreement to help promote MMA abroad, and the publicity value alone of the high-profile event will pay dividends. Despite the approximately $60 million price tag for the event and an expected $30 million loss for TKO, in an interview with Sports Business Journal, its president Mark Shapiro asked the reporter, “Are we really losing?”
That’s all to say that UFC Freedom 250 is emblematic of how politically connected corporations can gain extraordinary prestige and influence despite unresolved criticisms of their labor practices.
The guest list for the bouts includes several high-profile celebrities who may or may not attend. As for those who defy the traditional A- to D-list hierarchy, the NELK boys, whom White shouted out onstage at a rally in Florida on the heels of Trump’s 2024 election victory, are expected to attend. Kick streamer Adin Ross, however, will not, saying on a recent livestream that his attendance could be seen as a political statement. It’s a tough pill to swallow, especially given that Ross interviewed Trump on the campaign trail.
Ross was also among those whom White shouted out onstage at that rally, and he has praised White for his supposed generosity. According to Ross, White gave him $550,000 the first time they met when the clip-farming gambling streamer was half a million dollars in the hole. At the time, White paid off his marker and tossed in another $50,000 just because.
Despite an 81 percent chance of rain with severe thunderstorms expected from Sunday afternoon and into the evening, White has promised that the show would go on. “I don’t care if it snows, rains, we’re going. Even lightning. You guys all played sports when you were growing up. Whenever there was lightning, you’d sit the lightning out. When it was over, you played. That’s what we’ll do.”
A federal judge ruled Friday that Trump did not exceed his authority in allowing the event to be held on the White House grounds, so UFC Freedom 250 is expected to proceed as planned. Brendan Ballou, who litigated the challenge to the event, told the Prospect over email: “This isn’t a case about a sporting event, it’s about corruption, as a handful of people and companies stand to profit off our public monuments. While we’re disappointed in this decision, we of course respect it, and we’ll keep bringing cases to raise the cost of corruption in America.”
